Pass the Bakhtin, please

Perhaps the greatest serendipity yesterday happened when I opened a book on High Russian Literary Theory  (Mikhail Bakhtin:  Creation of a Prosaics)  and encountered this amazing passage:

In "Toward a Philosophy of the Act," he argues that each self is unique because each aggregate of the related and the unrelated is different.  There can be no formula for integrity, no substitute for each person's own project of selfhood, no escape from the ethical obligations of every situation at every moment.  Or, as Bakhtin often sums up the point:  "There is no alibi for being."

And then this morning, I read this:

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

Eliot, "Ash Wednesday" (1930)

  
as Auden puts it later, "What else am I made for, believing or not believing?"