“The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” sounds like an enormous warning to me. Between the cautionary yellow
fog, the eternal Footman holding your coat, and swimming freely then realizing
all was a dream and drowning upon awakening, it all sounds like one big wake-up
call (slight pun intended) that time is way
shorter than we humans seem to think of it being. According to this poem, we
should do all that we can in our time allotted (meaning the time in which we
are alive), or it could run out on us. In this precious time that we have, we should confess to the person we love, we
should go for and get our dream job,
and we should check off every goal on
our bucket lists. “Do I dare to eat a peach?” You’d better!
T.S. Eliot warns of the disillusionment
that time can be held onto forever in this poem of his. Sure, “in a minute
there is time/ for decisions and revisions”, but if we constantly hesitate and procrastinate,
not one of the possibilities in those
decisions will ever come to fruition—we will be wasting time, and that’s what Eliot is getting across.
Does that not panic you?
Eliot’s not the only one who’s
attempted to get this message of limited time out. The first story that comes
to mind related to this is the movie It’s
Kind of a Funny Story, where in the end, the main character is going on
about enjoying and actually living life. My personal weekday routine consists of
school, maybe marching band practice, homework, sleep, and starting all over
again the next day. On the weekends, I attempt to catch up on sleep and more
homework. I am basically measuring my methodical life in something like “coffee
spoons” because there is no real variety in what I do. I am not truly “living”
while I can and therefore wasting time. Maybe Eliot’s poem isn't completely
about ‘living’ or lost time either, but it terrifies me to think that I might “wake
up” from my dreamlike state of thinking that I had all this time to use and “linger”
when I actually didn't, and I “drown” in reality. Have I been “etherized” all
this time?
Another movie (can’t help it) relating
to this topic is A Beautiful Mind. In
the movie, the protagonist is diagnosed with schizophrenia after others around
him realize that he had been perceiving and responding to people that were made
up in his mind and weren't actually there. Since I have both watched this movie
and read Eliot’s poem recently, the ideas from each have started to blend a bit
in my mind. What I've gotten from both stories is that there is an actual
possibility that, as I experience life, what I am now perceiving and
interacting with on a daily basis is not real. There is no proof that I am not the schizophrenia patient; I
may be just a little more controlled or mild. I could even just not exist
myself. Who’s to tell me I do? Everyone shows up how I perceive them to be,
right? So how should I presume?
I suppose that’s another part of Eliot’s
poem. There is a great illusion by humans that there is always more time, so
they should act and make decisions while they can. However, there is also the
question of how do we go about making
those decisions? We know we have a time limit, but what if life is meaningless after all? What if my
desires and goals that I wish to accomplish aren't even worth it? We wouldn't even
be able to know whether they were until we decided to act upon them. So how can
we muster the confidence to go after something we have no way of ensuring will
turn out good for us? Do we just go for it, anyway? Yes? Then, how, Eliot? He does not seem to give this question a clear answer.
It’s interesting to see how much actual
uncertainty about life is reflected in this poem of Eliot’s, which is fitting
for a modernist writer who is all too familiar with disillusionment and disorientation.
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