Francesco Arena

Engraved on the bronze seat of a swing is the phrase: IN MY BEGINNING IN MY END / IN MY END

IS MY BEGINNING. The phrase is the opening of East Coker, the second of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

“En ma fin est mon commencement” was the motto on Mary Stuart’s banner, which Eliot literally takes up, translates, and reverses (“In my beginning is my end”) at the start of the first movement of this second Quartet, connecting it to a fragment by Heraclitus (Fragment LXX) which states: “The beginning and the end are one.” The phrase is engraved in two parts, facing opposite directions, corresponding to the two directions in which the swing moves: forward and backward.