Autumn Term
7th DECEMBER 2020 Issue 1 : 4th September 2020
Dear Parents, Please find an excerpt from today's assembly from Dr McShane: You girls, have been superb. I couldn’t have asked of anything more from you. You have followed the rules. You’ve not enjoyed them, you’ve not enjoyed being stuck in the same four classrooms, you’ve not enjoyed the uncertainty of the future and factors beyond your control – particularly the exam cohorts. But you have carried yourselves cheerfully, you’ve got on with it. One of life’s greatest unsung skills is the ability to get on with things; in some ways getting on with things, a singularly unglamorous phrase, is the same thing as bravery. And bravery is all you ever need. It underpins everything. Thank you girls. You are a credit to this wonderful community. We’re living through a particularly strange period; we are, in fact, living through history. But it is a peculiar history. It is one of frustrations and stasis and not going anywhere, yet I cannot remember being so busy. And yet it is all so tedious. I’m staying in the same place, yet I’m run off my feet. I’m bored by the whole thing but I’m overstimulated. How is that possible? Well I think this actually isn’t a new concept. T.S Eliot, one of my favourite poets, very nearly expressed this with the words: At the still point of the turning world Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor forwards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither Movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point. There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. As always with Eliot, at first it sounds just like a symphony of beauty, and a masterful command of English – almost unbeaten, in my opinion, save one bloke from Stratford upon Avon. Then, once you’ve got over the assault on your senses, you have to work out what Eliot is trying to say, and once you’ve done that, you crumple in a heap on the floor again, weeping at the intelligence and beauty of it all, whilst still not quite understanding it – again a contradiction (but I’m happy to live with it). This bit, however, could be said, plumb spang, to apply to our times. There’s no getting round all the contradictions of our current predicament (or indeed, life itself). We always want what we don’t have. Constant movement makes us stressed; lack of movement makes us bored. But perhaps the problem lies in how we think, which tends to be in opposites. In this sense, the poem explores the possibility of a mindset in which contradictions can exist in total harmony. Now, this is very difficult to articulate, and Eliot spends the entire, lengthy poem called Four Quartets trying to make this point in different ways. But essentially, it is at the seemingly contradictory ‘still point of the turning world’, that we find the dance.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Dr Claire McShane.