Distracted from distraction by distraction

In today's sermon, our minister quoted the line

Distracted from distraction by distraction

It is from T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, third stanza. The Four Quartets were written over a six year period and finally collected together in 1943.

The third stanza is worth reading in full.

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.

Eliot was writing about sense, wisdom, choices, tradition, grace. But with eyes of the present, we can read the same words as startlingly prescient of our current social media-rich, always connected environment.

Distracted from distraction by distraction

[snip]

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

[snip]

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Dessication of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;

Perhaps our challenge is not with technology per se but with technology as an amplifier of the human condition which is sometimes prone to descend lower, descend only into the world of perpetual solitude.

Perhaps the issue is not technology but our continuing inability to strike the right balance between technology's inner world and the world of sense, fancy, and spirit. That suggests that the problem is not technology but in the human system itself.

Worth re-reading the whole poem in a contemporary light.