"In my beginning is my end"
About this Quote
A whole theology of time gets smuggled into seven plain words. "In my beginning is my end" sounds like a proverb you might find carved into a church wall, but Eliot makes it feel newly unsettling by lodging the finish line inside the starting gun. The grammar performs the idea: the end isn’t after the beginning, it’s in it, nested like a flaw in the material or a seed already committed to its own decay.
The line comes from "East Coker", one of the Four Quartets, written with Europe in flames and modern confidence in ruins. Eliot had already watched the 20th century discredit the story of linear progress; here he offers a colder, more bracing alternative. History doesn’t march forward so much as it circles, repeating its mistakes with different costumes. Personal life does, too: the habits that form us early become the walls we later pace, the origin story doubling as a trap.
There’s a spiritual subtext that keeps the line from collapsing into fatalism. Eliot’s “end” isn’t only death; it’s telos, an ultimate meaning that can’t be reached by accumulation or self-improvement. You don’t outgrow the question of where you come from; you return to it with better (or more desperate) attention. The wit is austere: he turns nostalgia into a warning and mortality into a kind of instruction, insisting that every beginning already carries its verdict - and, if you read closely, its possibility of redemption.
The line comes from "East Coker", one of the Four Quartets, written with Europe in flames and modern confidence in ruins. Eliot had already watched the 20th century discredit the story of linear progress; here he offers a colder, more bracing alternative. History doesn’t march forward so much as it circles, repeating its mistakes with different costumes. Personal life does, too: the habits that form us early become the walls we later pace, the origin story doubling as a trap.
There’s a spiritual subtext that keeps the line from collapsing into fatalism. Eliot’s “end” isn’t only death; it’s telos, an ultimate meaning that can’t be reached by accumulation or self-improvement. You don’t outgrow the question of where you come from; you return to it with better (or more desperate) attention. The wit is austere: he turns nostalgia into a warning and mortality into a kind of instruction, insisting that every beginning already carries its verdict - and, if you read closely, its possibility of redemption.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mortality |
|---|---|
| Source | East Coker (poem), in Four Quartets; opening line: "In my beginning is my end." First published 1940; collected in Four Quartets (1943). |
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