Eliot's complaint cuts deeper than the usual lament about inattentiveness—he's describing the peculiar modern tragedy of living at high velocity, where we accumulate moments like stamps in a book but never read the book itself. The phrase suggests that meaning isn't something that happens *to* us passively while we're busy experiencing; it requires a kind of deliberate afterthought, a turning back. Consider how we photograph vacations obsessively, capturing the Eiffel Tower's light at sunset, only to discover months later that the memory feels hollow—we were too busy documenting to actually *be* there. Eliot reminds us that the gap between sensation and understanding isn't a small thing; it's where most of life actually disappears.