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Go, go, go said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality.
Oh God! May I be alive when I die.
It seems to me that the poem by Eliot, from which I have quoted only two lines, evokes a condition beyond time and space, where a meeting takes place between all that has and has not been, in an abundance and lack of meaning. Too full and too empty, like existence.
Human beings do not appear to be able to give up the search for a meaning in life. Winnicott's prayer seems to be a desire to find such a meaning in the rich experience of every moment, right up to the very last one.
Some people appear to place meaning which is immanent in things mostly in affective cathexis and human relationships, facing up to narcissistic and object losses, and the inevitable quotas of disappointment and pain. Others seem less able to bear the discovery of inner and outer reality, I and attempt to resist the fact that such losses are obvious and unavoidable, by voraciously pursuing and keeping hold of power over objects, even risking their destruction.
When working with our patients, we may have the chance, though we do not always manage to take it up, of learning with them to bear some more of life's strange game, where, on occasion, the fullness of the most intense emotions coincides with the emptiness of loss.