Time the destroyer is time the preserver.

The line comes from T. S. Eliot’s late poetic sequence *Four Quartets*, specifically the second poem, “East Coker” (first published 1940; collected 1943). Written during the Second World War, the Quartets meditate on history, personal and cultural decay, and the possibility of spiritual renewal. “East Coker” is rooted in Eliot’s ancestral village in Somerset and reflects on cycles of growth and dissolution—of bodies, communities, and civilizations. In this setting, Eliot frames time as a force that both erodes what humans build and, paradoxically, sustains continuity through memory, tradition, and the recurring patterns of life.

Eliot compresses a central paradox of the Quartets: time is not merely an agent of loss but also the medium through which meaning can be conserved and recovered. “Destroyer” points to time’s inevitable work—aging, entropy, historical catastrophe, the fading of individual lives. Yet “preserver” suggests that time also carries forward what matters: experience ripens into wisdom, suffering can be transfigured into insight, and tradition can transmit value across generations. The line resists a purely tragic view of temporality, implying that endurance and renewal are inseparable from the very process that brings decay.