During my undergraduate years at Fordham College, one of the premier course offerings in the English Department was one that wed T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" with the late String Quartets of Beethoven.In today's New York Times, Anthony Tommasini, their talented music critic, reports on a splendid performance in New York that brought the two together: "Eliot's and Beethoven's Voices Yoked."Tommasini valiantly and modestly tries to capture what Eliot's poems are about. He writes:

I hesitate to try to summarize the themes of the Eliot poems, which deal with issues regarding mans relationship with time. Time is described as claiming man, holding him to the material world and preventing him from knowing spiritual transcendence. The past cannot be changed, and the future is unknowable, Eliot argues.

Yet one can't but marvel that Tommasini seems to miss what is, for Eliot, the heart of the matter. For, of course, Eliot famously confesses:

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood isIncarnation.Here the impossible unionOf spheres of existence is actual,Here the past and futureAre conquered and reconciled

And, rather than any excarnational flight from time, Eliot's incarnational faith boldly affirms:

Only through time time is conquered.

For all time is now Advent time.