Superbowl & Enlightenment

Happy Supersalsabowl day. I'm not a football fan, I'm more the other kind of futbol fan. Come to think of it, I don't actually know who's playing today. I suppose I will enlighten myself before I head over to a friend's for the big game.

On to enlightenment. I know I make a radical jump from football to Eliot, but I will say that a football has four quarters just like the quartets. I think it's just a nice, symmetrically asthetic way to divide up most anything.
Every time I read passages from the Four Quartets, I feel a bit more enlightened. The first time I read it, I thought Ok this is beautiful. Since then, I seem to have little 'ahs' of recognition where I focus in on a small piece that begins to make sense. Today I like this section:

V
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mass of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. (30-1)

How often does one struggle to find the words to encompass what one feels? I personally will settle for a word that serves to get the overall point across because I know that anything else is futile. I've tried before to explain an extreme emotion I felt from a book, a song, a sunset, etc, and the response typically is "mhmmm." It is so Frustrating! They have no idea what you felt because they didn't.
Only rarely can one share an experience with another, and usually the sharing does not come in the form of words.
Words can explain the mundane, but they can only stretch and reach and attempt to explain the extreme.
Now it seems fitting to make my own attempt to flesh out an understanding of epiphany. I do like what Ellmann says of Joyce's epiphany in his Ulysses on the Liffey though I don't have his book in front of me at this moment. It was something about a "sudden turn about." There comes a moment when one must suddenly shift one's mind to comprehend that which mundane words cannot. One's mind seems to shift out of the world of words (seeing that they are incapable) and into a realm that occupies a level that does not have a word (excepting the word 'epiphanic.') In my opinion, epiphanies are mesmeric because they have no words. How often do we get to experience something and not talk about it?
Words take up every day all the time. We are always introducing words to say something, mean something, tick away the clock.
So then, without words, we can pause the clock and have a wordless moment that means more than a thousand words.