Ah, Prufrock

Whenever I feel like pondering time and mortality (as on this, the first day of the next four years), and need a reminder to stop and smell the roses, T.S. Eliot always does the job. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" manages to evoke empathy for an unfulfilled life, and to inspire a drive for truth, authenticity, and passion.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea. . . .

Everyone dons a different mask for a different social occasion. "Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet" -- such a facade that we all endorse and perpetuate by default! Eliot obviously didn't mean it this way (writing in the early decades of the last century), but it also echoes the facade of depression: present a happy face in public, to mask the private despair. And Prufrock is depressed, representing as he does the post-Great War era engulfed in gloom and misery.

In a way, the poem also speaks to the postmodern (also clearly not Eliot!) If everyone wears a mask, what's "real"? At what point does the mask itself become an identity?

. . . And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair— . . .

. . . Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. . . .

Complacency wastes time and life, in the end.

My favorite verse:

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume? . . .

And the most haunting verse:

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

If that's not a call to make a difference in some way, what is? It practically screams "Carpe Diem" or "Go for broke!". Does it matter if it's God, arbitrary and selective history, or someone else's fleeting happiness that determines a "successful" life? Well yes, IMO, but that's another discussion...