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The rebuilding of the World Trade Center on June 23, 2016. (Photo by Drew Angerer via Getty Images)

Things Worth Remembering: The Fight to Recover What Has Been Lost

Between two world wars and a mental breakdown, T.S. Eliot still believed in the possibility of restoration.

By Douglas Murray

November 26, 2023

Welcome back to Douglas Murray’s Sunday column, Things Worth Remembering, where he presents passages from great poets he has committed to memory—and explains why you should, too. To listen to Douglas read from “The Four Quartets,” click below:

Before the First World War, you might say that the tightrope walk between civilization and barbarism had been precarious. But civilization always managed to soldier on.

And yet something happened during the war that, I believe, Europe is still recovering from. The great French writer and aphorist Paul Valéry summed up part of it in his 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”: “Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.” 

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