Either Fire or Fire

From the back cover:

"Either the fire of damnation or the fire of creation (although actually Eliot himself was probably writing about purgatorial fires here- the flame that prepares a person for heaven, not heaven itself. Eliot, for whom heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens; for whom heaven is a breathless, airless miniature of life, everything glued down where it is [the still point in the turning world]. Eliot, who so much mistook daytime rituals imitating death- mistook them for life, life at its absolute most pitched; a hollow man who stuffed himself with dried-out pages of dead books and thought it, for some reason, better than being stuffed with straw. Of course Eliot could never know the flame itself as the highest heaven a person could ever live in- the flame, the kiln, the doing and the becoming, the highest heaven that a person need ever live in)."