Notes: Culture for T.S. Eliot (3/4/12)

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is an essay written by T.S. Eliot, where the essayst defines his concept of culture. In it he writes that there is a disintegration of culture and he underlines that culture is a mean to make feel people at ease and united in the world.
He reflects about contemporary world because he feels uneasy in it, because culture, values and society are decaying and not united: C. Darwin discovered man is not God's son; A. Einstein established relativity of time and space; H. Bergson revolutionized the concept of time. So people have not anymore values and clutch to what they already have. Mr Eliot notices the world is decaying (not only natural world, but also people's relationships and the relationship with themselves).
Mr Eliot tried to transmit people the disintegration of culture and of the world throughout language: in his poem The Waste Land he inserts many scenes that are not logically linked. Culture, that could be a mean to unite the world, is not able to do anything.
He writes that in Medieval Ages the world and society were all united: there were values, points of reference and everyone accepted his condition.
T.S. Eliot was born in America and he belonged to an important family and he frequented to the most important schools of the country (an example is Harvard University). His family followed traditions and it thaught Mr Eliot the values and the traditions of the family, even if he lived in a disgregated country, composed of many states with many different laws. So Mr Eliot decided to travel to Europe to look for unity and cohesion. When he arrived in London, he found a mixed world, with many languages and people from the whole world.