Cartier Bresson and Eliot on the Nature of the “Moment”

 

This piece develops some of the reflections I first explored in my 2019 essay, The Rhapsody of Time Passing. I have been thinking of the phrase "unattended moment" and-the "moment in and out of time" in T S Eliot's Four Quartets. And the "decisive moment" as described by the photographer Cartier-Bresson. There seems to me to be a profound connection between these two descriptions of a moment in time. Here,  I take a wander around that connection.

The Rhapsody of the Instant

There are moments when time behaves itself, and others when it seems to slip sideways. I have long been intrigued by that small perceptual glitch when one glances at a wristwatch and the second hand appears to hesitate, or even move backwards, before settling into its steady march. It is a trivial experience, yet it unsettles something fundamental. The mind expects continuity; the eye reports a stutter. And in that stutter lies a reminder that our access to reality is never as clean or as linear as we imagine.

If time is made of units — seconds, nanoseconds, whatever smallest bead the physicists may one day name — then what occupies the space between the beads? A friend once described this as a kind of cosmic abacus, the universe clicking its way forward. But if that is so, then the gap between the clicks becomes strangely charged: a place where the mind, reaching for the next number, finds instead a moment of suspension. A pause that is not quite time and not quite outside it.

This question — what happens between the units — has stayed with me. It is the same question that animates so much modern literature and art: how to reconcile the measurable with the lived, the clock with the consciousness that resists being parcelled into equal slices.

Bergson's "Pure Duration" and Eliot's Uneasy Struggle

Henri Bergson tried to dissolve the problem by insisting on pure duration, a flow of experience that cannot be chopped into units without doing violence to its nature. Eliot knew Bergson’s thought well; he attended the lectures in Paris in 1910–11, absorbing the promise that time might be experienced as a continuous unfolding rather than a sequence of fatalistic beats. 

But in Rhapsody on a Windy Night, written soon after, Eliot turns away from that optimism. The poem’s speaker walks through the night accompanied by the mechanical tolling of hours — “Twelve o’clock,” “Half-past one,” “Half-past two” — while his mind dissolves into involuntary memories. The clock drives him forward; his consciousness drags him back. No pure duration here. Only the uneasy duet of habit and dream.

Eliot's "Unattended Moment"

And yet, years later, in Four Quartets, Eliot discovers something else: not Bergson’s flowing durée, nor the clock’s rigid divisions, but a moment that arrives unbidden — “the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time.” This is not a moment seized by perception but one that interrupts it. A moment that does not belong to the cosmic abacus at all. It is as if the gap between the beads opens, and something from beyond the sequence looks back at us.

Cartier-Bresson and Eliot - The Contrast: Within and Without

Cartier‑Bresson, working with a camera rather than a pen, found his own version of the charged instant. His “decisive moment” is not outside time but perfectly within it — a fraction of a second in which the world briefly arranges itself into meaning. A boy leaps over a puddle; a cyclist flashes past a stairwell; a gesture, a shadow, a geometry align. The photographer does not create this alignment; he recognises it. His art depends on a taut, almost instinctive attentiveness. The decisive moment is the instant when time, usually so indifferent, suddenly reveals its coherence.

Eliot’s moment, by contrast, reveals its transcendence. Cartier‑Bresson’s is the triumph of perception; Eliot’s is the suspension of it. One redeems time aesthetically, the other metaphysically. And yet both arise from the same human bewilderment: the sense that time is not simply passing but happening — that within its flow there are instants which feel more real than the rest.

Between the Beats

Perhaps this is why the second hand sometimes seems to falter when we look at it. Not because time has stumbled, but because our consciousness has. For a fraction of a second, the mind is caught between the unit and the duration, between the beat and the flow, between the world as it is measured and the world as it is lived. In that hesitation lies the possibility of both the decisive moment and the unattended one — the photographer’s poised readiness and the poet’s receptive stillness.

The instant, it seems, is never merely an instant. It is a threshold. A rhapsody. A brief opening in which time reveals its double nature: the relentless march of the hours, and the mysterious shimmer that lies between them.

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Postscript — Within You and Without You

It was only after settling on the heading The Contrast - Within and Without that I realised how close it sits to George Harrison’s song Within You Without You. The echo is accidental, but perhaps not entirely. Harrison had an instinctive feel for the doubleness of experience — the inner life unfolding at its own pace, and the outer world pressing forward with its demands. His song turns on that same tension: the self moving through time, and time moving through the self.

Harrison’s insight was not philosophical in the academic sense, yet it touched the same nerve that Bergson, Eliot, and even Cartier‑Bresson were probing in their different ways. He sensed that life is lived in two tempos at once: the measurable and the immeasurable, the outward rhythm and the inward drift. To live “within you and without you” is to stand, however briefly, at the threshold where those tempos meet.

Or perhaps he was just a very instinctive songwriter.

Robert D. Kaplan and The Waste Land Revisited

 

More than a decade ago I wrote briefly here about The Waste Land as a poem of seasonal disquiet — April as the month that promises renewal yet exposes the brittleness beneath. I reminded myself how Eliot’s lines feel like a diagnosis of spiritual exhaustion, a culture unsure of its footing. At the time, as I always do ( I have the Waste Land to heart, it helps) I also reminded myself of elements in the poem which hint at the possibilities of renewal - be they ever so distant. I find myself returning to that terrain now, not through poetry but through Robert D. Kaplan’s new book, The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, which feels like a companion volume to those anxieties I explored back in 2015.

Kaplan borrows Eliot’s title knowingly. Where Eliot mapped the inner desolation of the West, Kaplan surveys the outer landscape — the geopolitical world of the early twenty‑first century, cracked and shifting under our feet. His argument is that we are living in a kind of permanent Weimar, a global order so interconnected that every tremor becomes an earthquake, yet so weakly governed that no one can steady the ground.

What strikes me most is Kaplan’s insistence that history is not a machine grinding toward a predetermined end. ( Is this true? How about Paul Kingsnorth's view in "Against the Machine?). Personalities still matter. Decisions still matter. The follies and vanities of leaders can tilt continents. In a time when many writers speak of drift, decay, and the slow unravelling of shared narratives, Kaplan reminds us that chaos is not inevitable — but neither is progress.

He is equally sharp on the internal pressures of our age: the rise of ideological certainties that leave no room for dissent, and the swelling bureaucracies — public and private — that flatten human difference into procedure. These forces, he suggests, do not merely irritate; they suffocate. And suffocation breeds its own forms of extremism.

I’m struck by how Kaplan relects Eliot as they both circle the same question: what does it mean to live in a civilisation that feels stretched thin, pulled between hope and dissolution? Eliot answered with fragments shored against ruin. Kaplan answers with a call for vigilance, for the kind of disciplined hope that refuses both fatalism and naïvety.

If Eliot’s waste land was spiritual, Kaplan’s is political — but the two landscapes are complementary. Both ask us to look unflinchingly at the world as it is, and still to believe that renewal is possible. Not guaranteed, not automatic, but possible.

And perhaps that is the thread that ties my earlier reflections to this book: the sense that we are living through a long season of change and decay, one that many writers now recognise. Kaplan’s contribution is to remind us that the task is not to predict the future but to prevent the worst of it. To keep fighting for order without extinguishing freedom. To cultivate hope without forgetting history’s darker lessons.

In other words: to live alertly in the waste land, and still plant something that might grow.

See the Book

The Myth of Ēostre: From Bede’s Line to the Bird and the Hare

 

Here, for Easter 2026, I trace  the origins and evolution of the modern myth of Ēostre, the hare, and the egg‑laying bird. Beginning with the sole early reference to the goddess — a single line in Bede’s De temporum ratione — it examines the long historical silence that follows and the nineteenth‑century scholarly reconstruction of “Ostara” by Jacob Grimm. I then explore how independent traditions of the Easter Hare and decorated eggs converged in Victorian imagination, and how American newspaper folklore of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced the now‑familiar tale of a freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs. Rather than an ancient pagan survival, the Ēostre myth emerges as a modern creation shaped by Romantic scholarship, children’s customs, seasonal storytelling, and cultural longing for symbolic meaning at the return of spring.

Part I — The Thin Thread: What Bede Actually Tells Us About Ēostre

If we strip away the pastel rabbits, the egg‑laying hares, and the internet’s fondness for “ancient pagan origins,” we are left with a single, slender thread: a brief remark by an eighth‑century Northumbrian monk. Everything we know — or think we know — about Ēostre begins with Bede, and Bede gives us almost nothing.

In De temporum ratione, his treatise on the reckoning of time, Bede pauses to explain the old English names of the months. When he reaches April, he writes that the Anglo‑Saxons once called it Eosturmonath, “the month of Ēostre,” named after a goddess in whose honour feasts were held. That is the entirety of the ancient record. No myths. No rituals. No sacred animals. No origin story. Just a name.

The silence is as important as the statement. Bede does not describe a cult, a temple, a priesthood, or a narrative cycle. He does not tell us what Ēostre looked like, what she governed, or how she was worshipped. He does not associate her with springtime fertility, with dawn light, with hares, with eggs, or with any of the symbols that modern retellings confidently place at her feet. He gives us a month‑name and a goddess‑name, and then moves on.

This is not unusual for Bede. His purpose was not to preserve pagan mythology but to explain the Christian calendar to an English audience. He mentions Ēostre only because her name lingered in the vernacular. The goddess herself may have been a fading memory even in his own time. Some scholars have gone further and suggested that she may never have existed at all — that Bede, fond of etymology, inferred a goddess behind the month‑name. Whether or not that is true, the fact remains: Bede is our only early witness, and he gives us no story to tell.

For nearly a thousand years after Bede, the name Ēostre disappears from the record. No medieval chronicler elaborates on her. No saga preserves her deeds. No church homily rails against her worship. No folk tradition mentions her. The goddess vanishes as abruptly as she appeared.

This long silence is the necessary starting point for any honest account of the “myth of Ēostre.” It is not a story of ancient continuity but of modern imagination — of how a single line in Bede became the seedbed for a reconstructed goddess, a Victorian springtime fantasy, and eventually the internet’s favourite explanation for the Easter Bunny.

The real story begins not in antiquity, but in the nineteenth century.

Part II — Grimm and the Nineteenth‑Century Rebirth of Ostara

After Bede, the name Ēostre falls silent for nearly a millennium. No medieval chronicler repeats it. No antiquarian glosses it. No folk tradition preserves even a shadow of her. For all practical purposes, the goddess vanishes. And then, in the early nineteenth century, she returns — not from the soil, but from scholarship.

In 1835, Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie, a vast attempt to reconstruct the pre‑Christian religion of the Germanic peoples. Grimm was a brilliant philologist, but also a Romantic nationalist, working in a cultural moment that longed for a unified German past. Where the record was thin, he was willing to infer, extrapolate, and imaginatively restore. It is in this spirit that he resurrected Bede’s Ēostre and gave her a new, German name: Ostara.

Grimm reasoned that if the Anglo‑Saxons had a spring goddess named Ēostre, then the continental Germans must have had one as well. He pointed to Old High German words such as Ôstarun (Easter) and Ostar‑tag (Easter day) as linguistic evidence of a lost deity. From these fragments, he reconstructed Ostara as a goddess of dawn and spring, a bringer of light and renewal. He imagined her as the personification of the rising sun, the brightening east, the quickening of the year.

But it is crucial to understand what Grimm was doing. He was not citing ancient sources. He was not reporting folklore. He was rebuilding a goddess from etymology and analogy, guided as much by poetic instinct as by evidence. Grimm himself admitted that the material was scant. Yet his reconstruction was compelling — so compelling that later writers treated Ostara as if she had always been there, waiting to be rediscovered.

From Grimm onward, Ostara begins to acquire attributes that Bede never mentioned. She becomes associated with spring flowers, with youthful renewal, with the first warmth after winter. Illustrators depict her as a radiant maiden stepping through thawing fields. Poets place her among blossoms and birdsong. The goddess who had been a single line in Bede becomes, in the nineteenth century, a figure of Romantic imagination.

Still, even here, one thing is missing: the hare. Grimm does not link Ostara to rabbits or hares. He does not mention eggs. He does not tell the story of a bird transformed. Those motifs will come later, from a different strand of nineteenth‑century creativity. But Grimm’s reconstruction provides the soil in which they will take root. By giving Ostara a name, a season, and a symbolic domain, he creates the conceptual space into which the hare and the egg will eventually be placed.

Thus the nineteenth century marks the goddess’s rebirth — not as an object of ancient devotion, but as a figure of scholarly imagination. From here, the modern myth begins to gather its familiar elements, one by one.

Part III — The Modern Myth: Hare, Bird, and Egg

By the time Jacob Grimm published Deutsche Mythologie in 1835, the goddess he called Ostara had been absent from the historical record for a thousand years. Grimm’s reconstruction gave her a season, a symbolic domain, and a poetic aura — but she still had no hare, no eggs, no miraculous transformations. Those motifs would come from elsewhere, through a convergence of folklore, migration, and Victorian imagination.

1. The Hare Before Ostara: A German Folk Tradition

Long before anyone linked a hare to a goddess, German-speaking Protestants had already developed a charming piece of children’s folklore: the Osterhase, the Easter Hare. The earliest written reference appears in 1678, in a medical dissertation by Georg Franck von Franckenau, who describes children eagerly awaiting the hare that brings coloured eggs at Easter.

This tradition was not mythic but domestic — a playful custom, much like the later Santa Claus. The hare was a judge of children’s behaviour, a bringer of treats, a creature of springtime abundance. It had nothing to do with Ēostre or Ostara. It was simply a hare that delivered eggs.

When German immigrants carried the Osterhase to Pennsylvania in the 18th century, the tradition took root in American soil. Children built nests for the hare; the nests became baskets; the eggs became chocolate. The hare was now firmly established in Easter folklore — but still unattached to any ancient goddess.

2. The Egg: Symbolism, Fasting, and Practicality

The egg’s association with Easter has deep roots, but not in Germanic mythology. Eggs were forbidden during the Lenten fast, yet hens continued to lay. By Easter, households had a surplus. Boiling and decorating them became a natural way to mark the end of abstinence.

In Christian symbolism, the egg represented the sealed tomb of Christ, cracked open at the Resurrection. In older Indo‑European traditions, eggs symbolised new life and the renewal of the year. These layers of meaning accumulated over centuries, but none of them involved a hare — and none involved Ēostre.

The modern myth arises when these two independent traditions — the hare and the egg — are brought together.

3. The Victorian Imagination: Ostara Gains Her Animals

The nineteenth century was fertile ground for myth-making. Romantic nationalism, antiquarian enthusiasm, and a hunger for picturesque pagan survivals created a cultural climate in which Grimm’s reconstructed Ostara could be elaborated almost without restraint.

Illustrators began to depict Ostara as a radiant maiden accompanied by hares. Poets placed her among blossoms and birds. The hare, already a symbol of spring and fertility, was a natural companion. Yet these images were artistic inventions, not survivals of ancient lore.

By the late nineteenth century, the association between Ostara and the hare had become so visually and poetically compelling that it began to be treated as traditional. The hare migrated from German children’s folklore into the imagined retinue of a reconstructed goddess.

Still missing, however, was the story that now circulates so widely: the freezing bird transformed into a hare that lays eggs.

4. The Birth of a Modern Legend: Newspapers and Children’s Stories

The fully formed tale — Ostara finding a bird with frozen wings, transforming it into a hare, and granting it the power to lay eggs — appears not in medieval manuscripts, but in late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century American newspapers.

Folklore columns of the period were fond of charming seasonal stories, often presented as “old legends” without sources. These pieces blended Grimm’s reconstructed goddess with the already‑established German Easter Hare and added a narrative flourish that Victorian readers adored: a compassionate goddess, a rescued creature, a miraculous transformation. It was a perfect springtime parable — tender, moral, and picturesque.

By the early 1900s, the story appears in multiple newspapers across the United States. Some versions describe Ostara discovering a small bird shivering in the snow, its wings frozen and useless. Moved by pity, she transforms it into a hare so that it might survive the winter. Yet the creature retains one trace of its former nature: the ability to lay eggs. In gratitude, the hare decorates these eggs and presents them to the goddess at the return of spring.

Children’s books soon adopted the tale, polishing it into a gentle moral fable. Each retelling added new details — the colours of the eggs, the flowers blooming at the goddess’s feet, the hare’s devotion — until the story acquired the soft glow of tradition. By mid‑century, it was widely repeated as “ancient,” even though its earliest textual roots lay in the imaginative journalism of the late Victorian era.

What began as a literary embellishment became, through repetition, a “legend.” And through the cultural alchemy of the twentieth century, it became something even more potent: a myth believed to be old because it feels like it ought to be.

...and so: The Making of a Modern Myth

If we follow the trail with care, the story of Ēostre and her hare is not a tale of ancient pagan survivals but of how modern cultures weave meaning from fragments. It begins with a single line in Bede: a month‑name and a goddess‑name, offered without myth or detail. For a thousand years, nothing more is said. Then, in the nineteenth century, Jacob Grimm resurrects the name and imagines a dawn‑goddess he calls Ostara, shaped as much by Romantic longing as by evidence. Around the same time, the German Easter Hare — a creature of children’s folklore rather than theology — crosses the Atlantic and settles into American custom. Victorian artists and writers, eager for picturesque paganism, place hares at the goddess’s feet. And finally, in the early twentieth century, newspaper storytellers give the myth its narrative heart: the freezing bird, the compassionate goddess, the miraculous transformation, the first egg‑laying hare.

None of this is ancient. Yet none of it is trivial. The myth of Ēostre is not a relic of the distant past but a record of our own imaginative needs. It shows how readily we graft stories onto the turning of the year, how instinctively we people the spring with figures of renewal, how naturally we reach for symbols — the egg, the hare, the thawing bird — to express the fragile abundance of early light. The tale persists not because it is old, but because it feels true in a different register: a parable of mercy, transformation, and the small, bright miracles of survival after winter.

In the end, the myth of Ēostre is a modern creation with ancient resonances. It reminds us that tradition is not only what we inherit but what we make.

1. Stephen Winick — “Ostara and the Hare”

Library of Congress Folklife Center Blog >>> here A clear, engaging explanation of how the modern bird‑to‑hare story emerged.

2. Ronald Hutton — The Stations of the Sun

Oxford University Press >>> here A readable, authoritative history of British seasonal customs, including Easter.

3. Venetia Newall — An Egg at Easter

Indiana University Press >>> here A beautifully written exploration of egg symbolism and Easter traditions worldwide.

4. Jacob Grimm — Teutonic Mythology (English Translation)

Free digital edition (Archive.org) >>> here The 19th‑century reconstruction that reintroduced “Ostara” into modern thought.

5. Bede — The Reckoning of Time (Excerpt)

Fordham Medieval Sourcebook >>> here Contains the only early reference to Ēostre.