"The Still Point of the Turning World"

This is one of the speaker's most concrete attempts to bring together a whole bunch of life's contradictions together in harmony in a single image. The "still point of the turning world" is a place of neither body nor spirit, "flesh nor fleshless." It doesn't move from anything or toward anything. It isn't goal-oriented. It's a place where our souls can find a sense of stillness and peace, even as the world continues to change.

There's no getting around all the contradictions of our lives. After all, we always want what we don't have. Constant movement makes us stressed; lack of movement makes us bored. Focusing too much on our souls makes us forget about the world; focusing too much on the world makes us forget about our souls. But maybe, just maybe, the problem lies with the way we think, which tends to be in opposites. In this sense, the speaker explores the possibility of a mindset in which total contradictions can exist in harmony. The fact that our language tends to always make sense of the world in opposites, though, makes it really difficult for the speaker to express what he's trying to say here, and he more or less spends all of "Four Quartets" trying to make his point in different ways.

"Still Point..." Timeline

• 64-65: "At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor / fleshless"
• 142-143: "Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still / At the still point of the turning world."