On the steep riverbank in Ljubljana, the forsythias appeared moments from bursting into yellow, the air outside Kavarna Rog just this side of comfortable. I might have been happier indoors, but after a long, icy winter, I wanted to be in fresh air. A change of two degrees delimited, it seemed, the time and space we’d recently left behind and what was about to arrive. Midwinter spring is its own season—the first line of “Little Gidding,” the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets—floated around in my memory that morning. I’d been in Slovenia about a week, at the start of a long-anticipated residency, when the sudden closure of America’s airports was announced. I left on the first flight out the next morning.
During those ten days in Ljubljana—which felt quite safe to me, despite news of a wave of viral death in next-door Italy—I’d been reading Four Quartets. I hadn’t picked up Eliot since college, where, at nineteen, I’d found his poetry majestic, arduous, occasionally chilling. English majors—what remains of them—don’t read Eliot these days. This is not to lament: there are many other things to read, and he, a once-mighty pillar of the twentieth-century syllabus, faded out for a range of reasons, the lone and level sands now stretching far away from his work.
A Faber edition of Four Quartets had long lived untouched in our bookcase. I’m not sure why I brought it with me to Slovenia, though poetry is ideal on the go, conducive as it is to snatches of time in between places. Eliot’s Quartets are four long poems, written in England at the onset of the Second World War. Each was published as it was written, in paper folio, and later the whole thing appeared as a book. In my seventh-floor garret in Ljubljana, I read the book twice from start to finish, alpha and omega. As soon as I’d finished, I felt a need to start again to allow what I’d read to sink in.
There’s a reason this book was so rarely assigned to undergraduates: these are meditations for the middle-aged. They’re Eliot trying to glean meaning from fragments of memory and the past, make sense of one’s place in time and what remains of it, and bear witness to his own lived experiences and losses in this world amidst that. He dives headlong into four disparate landscapes, the four classical elements, the divine and the sublime, to formulate an epic understanding of time. Time and its mystical passage—as in the chamber music from which the work takes its title—is present everywhere in the work.
Had I not left Ljubljana precisely when I did, I might not have been home when our dog, Baxter, suddenly died. My husband, Josh, and I, having agreed our very small house in Cam-bridge was not going to suffice with all three of us at home into the unforeseeable future, had relocated to Province-town three weeks prior. It was a terrible time to lose a dog, not least because, important as he was to us, Baxter’s death was a blip within an unfolding global human disaster. He’d seemed sick for two or three days, but there was nowhere to take him. We were far from a veterinarian, and when we did find one willing to see him, he died in our car on the way to the appointment. There was nothing that could have been done, the kind vet told us: he’d had cancer of the spleen, and there was no way anyone could have known. At least he hadn’t suffered, we told ourselves as Josh and I hugged each other and moped around our gapingly empty home, a hundred miles away from anyone we knew.
Some of Josh’s college friends had holed up together in a rambling, old house on the North Shore of Massachusetts, taking turns making meals—grocery shopping having gone from mundane to mortal danger—during the pandemic lockdown. People had started Zooming over cocktails, and these friends sensed how bereft Josh and I were out in Provincetown without Baxter, aimless and alone in our dogless home. They invited us to drive three hours north to join them in their together-isolation—an unexpected and emotionally generous gift, of the kind only the oldest of friends can bestow.
In the house at Littles Point, we read, drank, worked, cooked, drank more, exercised indoors, shared what we learned each day about the virus, grew closer as chosen family. There were also two dogs, both of whom seemed very happy to have us there, as if they sensed our need for canine companionship. Out there on the granite ledges, we even gave ourselves a name: the Livingston Seagulls. Its Seventies-ness suited our communal existence, lone gulls figuring it out on their own the vibe of that cultural moment.
The third of the Four Quartets—“The Dry Salvages”—is a rumination on loss at sea. Eliot wrote it in London during the Blitz, though its title refers to Cape Ann, the headland where Eliot spent the unhurried summers of his youth. The rocky edges of northeastern Massachusetts are dotted with small, generally uninhabited isles, in and around some of which young Eliot learned to sail. The poem’s namesake islands are low, flat, and completely bare of trees, the “dry” ones those still visible above the water line at high tide. They’re an offshore respite for seals and seabirds, and a peril for seafarers, situated as they are right off the coast of Rockport. The town juts like a boomerang into the ocean; it was once well known for quarries and painters. Route 127A—also named South Street—connects its center with Eastern Point in Gloucester, where the Eliot family summer house was built in 1896.
The Eliot family’s five-thousand-square-foot, seven-bedroom “summer cottage,” The Downs, still stands at 18 Edgemoor Road. Though T. S. Eliot was raised in St. Louis, he spent twenty boyhood summers there, from age five until he went to study in Paris in 1910. His father had the fireplace materials for The Downs sent from the family’s brickyards in Missouri. The family guarded jealously its connexions with New England, Eliot wrote in 1928, while back in St. Louis he missed the fir trees, the bay, and the goldenrod…the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts. The lots on Eastern Point have long since been re-sold, subdivided, built upon. In Eliot’s youth, it would have verged on wild, the road marking a boundary path between the town and the marsh, the sturdy bricks of their home and tidepools brimming with bladderwrack, the dank salt grasses and fuzzy line where the red granite enters the sea.
At the outset of the third of the Quartets, Eliot offers a parenthetical, exegetical note:
(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the north-east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pro-nounced to rhyme with assuages. Groaner: a whistling buoy.)
Eliot’s accent was a mélange of American and British English, so it’s not immediately obvious what he was trying to explain. There is, however, a recording of Eliot reading the published version of Four Quartets, and he makes clear with his own voice what he struggles to convey in his note: the name of these tiny yet treacherous humps in the sea is not the plural of “salvage”—after the flotsam from shipwrecks they’ve caused—but one where the second a represents a diphthong (as in “day”) and with stress on the second syllable. Eliot put a great deal of effort into explaining precisely how the poem’s title should be sounded out, presumably because he wanted to convey something very important to him about the place-name. I decided one morning, while we were living out on Littles Point, to drive to Cape Ann and see what it was that had so captured his imagination.
Why drive an hour north to look at rocks? Much like the season of Four Quartets’ composition, ours was a moment of stopped time. We were living through our own Blitz, albeit one of viral particles rather than firebombs: frontline workers shouldering the frenzy against disease and dislocation, food shortages, mass unemployment, terrific losses of life. It felt like an infinite moment—time before and time after in a dim light, as Eliot observed in “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets. Eliot wrote these poems to try to weave the riven fabric and splintered wood of memory into something that would make time make sense again. He composed a hymn of infolding human experience wherein the ashes and the fleeting rose come together in the finale as a singularity—and within this, the ragged rock in restless waters of his boyhood imagination played a role. I had to find them, I felt, to understand what Eliot was trying to tell us.
Route 128—also known as Yankee Division Highway, its northern arm connecting Peabody with Glou-cester—is usually a river-rapids of commuters; on my drive up to the Dry Salvages, I passed one other car. It was like motoring across an abandoned planet. I’d packed a sandwich and water, not knowing what life would be like outside now, or if there’d be anywhere open there to buy anything. It was gloriously sunny, the skies over Cape Ann Montana-wide, the steady, uphill ride onto the rocky headland like a launch off the continent, out into somewhere beyond. That day, in that moment in time, it felt like the tesseract.
In 1605, the French explorer Samuel de Champlain made the first recorded European survey of the coast of what is now Essex County, Massachusetts:
We made our way to the above-mentioned cape where, close to the mainland, are three islands covered with trees of different sorts. There is another low island upon which the sea breaks, which extends a little farther out to sea than the others, and upon it are no trees. We named this place le cap aux isles. Near it we caught sight of a canoe in which were five or six Indians (sauvages) who came towards us, but after approaching our pinnace, went back to dance on the beach (rivage).
Eight years later, Le cap aux isles was renamed Tragabigzanda by the English captain John Smith, allegedly after a woman he met while an Ottoman prisoner of war, whereafter Charles the First named it again for his mother, Anne of Denmark. None of the maps we have from this era records a name for the Salvages, and we have no knowledge of how the Pawtucket may have referred to them. In a letter to Samuel Eliot Morison just before Eliot’s death, the poet writes that he learned the precise pronunciation of the name from his brother.
The Massachusetts coastline north of Cape Ann alternates between sandbar and salt marsh, finally manifesting itself as pure rock at Annisquam—an affluent, picturesque harbor on the north side of Gloucester. The “squam” in Annisquam—which historical linguists think meant “the end of the marsh”—appears in a few other New England placenames of Algonquian origin: Squam Lake and Lake Winne-squam in New Hampshire, Squam Head on Nantucket. It eventually made its way into American English as the name of a waterproof fishing hat with a long, back brim, elsewhere known as a sou’wester, after the winds bringing tropical air to the British Isles. The iconic statue of the fisherman at the helm watching over Gloucester Harbor—“They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships,” a memorial to the thousands of local mariners lost at sea—wears a squam. Near the statue, a saltwater channel flows in, one which originates at Annisquam Harbor to the north. It is this many-branched waterway separating Rockport and eastern Gloucester from mainland Massa-chusetts, the Annisquam River, that makes Cape Ann itself an island.
A path down to the water from South Street, where I parked my car somewhat illegally at the roadside, leads moderately downhill through wild, coastal brush to a place known as Whale Cove. It halts at a steep bank, overlooking the Atlantic, and turns right along the shoreline—a public right-of-way passing in front of a private home and a farm—eventually leading to a field of bare seaside granite. Two shirtless men in long pants stood here, casting lines into the surf, their forms paralleling Cape Ann Light’s twin beacons in the distance. While they lured stripers, I watched an incoming tide break at the Dry Sal-vages. I’d stopped off here because the spot seemed to offer the best view: Straitsmouth Island obscures the view of them from Gap Head, though it lies closer. I stood for a while, thankful for the warming April sun, listening for the whistling buoy Eliot mentions in his introductory note, but heard only the clang of a far-off harbor bell. As I made my way back, the low groan of the arriving ocean began, tumbling the Pleistocene boulders in the cove over and over each other, their occasional rasp and layered lamentation not unlike whale song. Liquid consonants, sibilant stone, the wetness of many singers’ breath: it was a murmuration of flowing rock, an aqueous chorus, its overlapping bass intoning from right and left, like dozens of voices softly insisting in a language I did not know, yet understood as a feeling from somewhere deep in our past.
The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation
I was convinced then, by both sight and sound, that Eliot must have witnessed this too.
On the walk back to my car, I stumbled across a silver signpost, a tercentenary historical marker erected in 1930, recording that Champlain had been there, in that same place:
Due east from here on July 16, 1605 the Sieur de Monts sent Samuel de Champlain ashore to parley with some Indians. They danced for him and traced an outline map of Massachusetts Bay. These French explor-ers named this promontory, The Cape of Islands.
I knew none of this before I went out there—that this place which spoke aloud in its ancient, geologic, hydrophonic language witnessed the first known encounter between the Indigen-ous of New England and the Euro-peans who, as settlers, preachers, warmakers, tradespeople, fisherfolk, and more, would come to build their houses—and later their summer cottages—on the high rock of Cape Ann.
On Saturday mornings, my father would drop the younger me off at the Lawrence Public Library—then still resplendent in its 1970s Brutalism—and collect me when it closed at five p.m. Truth be told, I had no friends: I was young for my grade, too bright for my school, loved to read, hated getting dirty, and, though I didn’t know it yet, gay. Winnie, the children’s room librarian, effectively became my weekend child-minder as well as my personal book recommender. At her suggestion, I read Susan Cooper’s Over Sea, Under Stone, set on the rocky cliffs of Cornwall, which tells the tale of three children sent to stay with their Great Uncle Merry for a summer of adventure during which they find the Grail. Yes, that grail, of Christian belief and Arthurian legend, rescuer of the Fisher King, the latter of which I next encountered as a college student, in a course on Anglo-American Modernism, while reading Eliot’s The Waste Land. I read Cooper’s book back then in library hardcover with dust-jacket protector, on a sunny Sunday, under the hickory in my childhood backyard, alone but for the company of our dog, Rocky.
I’ve still never been to Cornwall, though every year I mean to go. In some ways it seems non-urgent: a re-tirement holiday, a series of quiet drives and strolls without any particular destination, the region’s standing stones more permanent and patient than just about anything else ever put up by humankind. I reread Susan Cooper during the pandemic, its chase less harrowing to an adult, yet its evocation of Trewissick and St. Austell still as vivid as the day it first entered my mind. I realized in my re-reading that the Cornwall of my imagination is certainly not Cornwall, nor even Cape Cod, with its Cornish-derived town names like Truro and Falmouth. The Cornwall in my mind looks like Cape Ann.
In the days before Baxter died, not knowing he would die, but with what suddenly appeared to be all that time—time that felt endless, time as life’s wreckage, days that felt long and open because the world hadn’t adjusted to what was happening, hours tense and fraught because fear compacted them—I took him on his three favorite walks: along Provincetown Harbor by the waterfront houses; through the salt marsh to the gay beach; across the granite breakwater to Wood End Light. On our way back from this last walk, Baxter paused at a spot he’d leapt across many times—he was an eighty-pound rescue mutt, and loved to climb—and stood barking at me. I’d passed slightly ahead but turned back, calling to him. Eventually I climbed back down to where he was to show him an easier route, but he wouldn’t follow me. Baxter continued to bark, and I knew—though I couldn’t know the extent of it—he was telling me something was seriously wrong. When he died, when I lost my all-day, everyday companion, my furry shadow, the image of the two of us stuck on those rocks, surrounded by water, was all I could see and hear for days and days on end.
On our return to Provincetown from the warm-hearted, sociable weeks on Littles Point—a drive of 125 miles, still with almost no one else on the road—we stopped at the veterinarian’s office in Eastham to collect Baxter’s ashes. Our mothers asked us what we’d do with them, my brother whether there would be a ceremony. I hadn’t found the emotional space yet to give the matter any thought, but knew there would be no scattering. “When I die,” I turned and said to Josh, “I want you to bury Baxter with me.”
I’m in Ljubljana once again, in the state-managed garret on the seventh floor from which I’d fled at the start of the pandemic. Five thousand miles from Cape Ann, I’ve somehow come back here to finish writing this. There is one more thing I need to tell you.
I know one poem by heart. I’ve recited it many times—indeed, for every occasion on which I’ve been called upon to recite a poem. It’s short and uncharacteristic of Eliot’s work, and it’s set in Wales. While working through blue boxes of his papers in Harvard’s Houghton Library, diving around “The Dry Salvages,” I came to a sheet typed with a forgettable poem, and on its reverse—lightly scribbled in pencil, as one might pass a snatch of time in between places—was the original of “Usk,” the Eliot poem I had memorized at age nineteen:
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit’s chapel, the pilgrim’s prayer.
In that moment, part of both time present and time past, finding “Usk” felt like reaching the end of the road. The pandemic had ended, we were back in our house in Cambridge, the world-clock was wound and running again. I’d come upon the answer to what Eliot wanted to convey: old stones cannot be deciphered, they merely exist and are perceived. As Eliot writes in “Little Gidding,” “The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” In our time of global isolation, I went on an obscure quest to an obscure place to find my way back to the beginning.
Jeremy Faro is a writer who now lives in Rhode Island. His piece in this issue is part of an in-progress essay collection, some of which has previously appeared in Prairie Schooner.