Hello, Euston?

Way back on April 13th – centuries in blog years – I wrote about the Euston Manifesto. Last night was the formal launch of the document and one of it's authors, Norman Geras, gave a talk about it. He publishes that talk today on his blog. Reading the speech he gave, I rather wish I had been able to attend. His written words are very powerful, I would have enjoyed hearing them.

By one of those coincidences that don't mean anything, 70 years ago today – and I mean to the very day – the poet T.S. Eliot paid a visit to a small hamlet in Cambridgeshire. He took the name of this place as the title for the fourth of his Four Quartets – 'Little Gidding'. What has that got to do with the Euston Manifesto? Nothing, really.

But in the way of these things, I went back to the poem just to have a look, in case (you never know) I might find some other connection than merely the date. What I came back to there were these lines:

And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from…

There you go – that gives me somewhere to start from this evening. Because I want to talk about ends and beginnings in both a public and a personal sense.

That is just the opening of a brilliant piece of public speaking. You really should read the entire post. As I said when I originally wrote about the manifesto, finding common ground with people like Mr. Geras would be a joy. Although people of good intentions can disagree on many points, often they find they can also agree on many others. And in talking and finding that common ground they are able to solve many problems.

The end is where we start from.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan has some helpful advice for a few people.