Out of Africa, T.S. Eliot, Karen Blixen, Four Quartets

There is a zebra on the front cover of Out of Africa; and one pencil mark in the text from an earlier reading, beside this paragraph.

Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives.
       Out of Africa, p. 261, Cape Edition, 1966.

Copying out (not copying and pasting) a paragraph into a new place suddenly opens it to new meaning. Released from the spell of reading Karen Blixen, tapping away at my copying, my delight starts to fracture. Though she was evidently liked and even loved by the Natives on her farm, and her observations about them are born of long experience, I start to balk at her language, at the idea of commissioning a Kikuyu to hold your horse, for example, while you visit a Lady in her Library. Is this Kikuyu patience, or is it something quite irrelevant to patience? Is their 'serenity only a deliberate hebetude', as T.S. Eliot says in Four Quartets?

Then, once again, I would like to think that there are, or were circa 1925, people who do not try to pass the time but sit down and live. I saw one sitting under a tree in West Cork circa 1985 and was well impressed. He was looking west when we passed by early in the afternoon, and was still there, looking west, when we came back a couple of hours later.

Karen Blixen gives rise to T.S. Eliot on a wet and sweeping April Sunday in Ireland. Reading interlocks like the vests of yore. Questions multiply idly and well. How does T.S. Eliot occupy landscape? With a growing terror of nothing to think about? As a distraction by distraction from distraction? T.S. Eliot did not know any Natives. He did not sit and live. He is not on friendly terms with time. There is much wailing and wreckage and despair; the best he can hope for is a conscienceless drift in restless waters. But he did know the river within us, the strong brown god, even if he converted the river, and everything else, almost instantaneously into words.

I tend to read Four Quartets to reacquaint with my old responses to favourite passages. This time, holding Karen Blixen's horse in strong sunlight in  Nairobi, I read it differently. I foundered among the rocks of The Dry Salvages as never before.

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

It is, as they say, a no-brainer.