On the wisdom that has no floor
“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Eliot has just spent a passage dismissing the wisdom of age as a dishonest thing, mostly composed of the errors one has grown attached to. What survives the dismissal is small.
Endless is the difficult word. Not a state to reach and hold, but something with no bottom — every settled understanding turning out, later, to have been another position from which not to look. It is not a comforting line, and it was not meant to be.