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The 52:52:52 project, launching both on this site and on social media in early 2024 will help you address 52 issues with 52 responses over 52 weeks.

A Mundane Comedy is Dominic Kelleher's new book, which will be published in mid 2024. The introduction is available here and further extracts will appear on this site and on social media in the coming months.

This site addresses what's changing, in our own lives, in our organisations, and in wider society. You'll learn about key changes across more than 150 areas, ranging from ageing and time, through nature and animals, to kindness and love...and very much else inbetween.

Halcyon's aim is to help you reflect on how you can better deal with related change in your own life.

On T.S. Eliot

East Coker

 

T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.

Recently, The Waste Land and Modernity tried to figure out whether someone who captured modern life so well could really dislike it so much. When he stared out at a world of radio and cinema, of radical art and universal suffrage, did Eliot really see only a barren, featureless plain? (See, for example: The Waste Land describes a sickness, without a prescription.) Perhaps listening to Eliot himself read The Waste Land can give us clues?

2022 marked the centenary The Waste Land, published on 15 October 1922. For decades, Eliot actively discouraged biographical interpretations of his work, developing an ‘impersonal theory’ of poetry in which the private life of a poet was deemed irrelevant. Instead, scholars were guided by Eliot's own seven pages of footnotes to the poem, but, in 2020, there were dramatic new revelations that demonstrated how, behind the mask, there was a much more personal story to be found within the poem.

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