The Five Most Important Books for Randall Kennedy: T.S. Eliot again

Randall Kennedy is a professor at Harvard where he teaches courses on contracts, freedom of expression, and the regulation of race relations. From his books the best known is probably Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. In Sellout. The Politics of Racial Betrayal he analyzes the delicate balance at the border between races.

He gives in the latest issue of Newsweek his list of Five Most Important Books (and his reasons):

1. The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter (it ignited his interest in history).
2. Black Boy by Richard Wright (it indelibly imprinted on him the horrors his grandparents and parents faced as blacks in the pre-civil-rights Deep South).
3. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 by Eric Foner (a magnificent scholarly edifice).
4. Our Undemocratic Constitution by Sanford Levinson (a fearless examination of the Constitution by one of the most adventurous - and overlooked - U.S. intellectuals.)
5. Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot (because it contains the poem East Coker, in which one finds the lines, For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business).

You see, T.S. Eliot comes the third time in the top of preferences for authors interviewed in the last two months! Here is the whole stanza:

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 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 mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

(A Life in Books)