‘In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.’
So opens East Coker, the second of T.S.Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’. Apposite lines as more of our architectural heritage has been lost or is imperiled. But this, the first day of a new year, is an occasion for optimism, to feel that 2020 will be better than its predecessor, and that circumstances can be improved. Disappointed in the past, now is a moment to embrace the future, and to remember the lines with which Eliot closes the same quartet:
‘Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.’

The Irish Aesthete sends every good wish for 2020 to all friends and followers.

Photographs of Colbinstown Graveyard, County Kildare.