ABSTRACT
In Eliot’s Early Years , Lyndall Gordon argues that a series of inexplicable metaphysical moments, beginning in 1910 as Eliot graduates from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree, impel him on a lifelong quest for religious order. Gordon uncovers these visions in the Berg Collection manuscripts, specifically in “2nd Debate between the Body and Soul,” where a “ring of silence … closes round him and seals him off, in a state of beatific security, from the floods of life that threaten to break like a wave against his skull. … Contained there, he contemplates the power of some unverbalized, elusive truth, taking command of it, and then bursting out, ingenuous and pure” (39). This moment serves as an oasis in the “clatter of graduation, the exhortation of practical men, the questions of parents, the frivolity of millinery and strawberries” (34–5).
