[Please
note: this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Sam's work. Sam, who is eighteen years old, gave his permission for
his work and picture to appear here.]
Every person has some
stories, works of art, or ideas that he or she just won’t understand the first
times around; for me, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
fell into this category. Two recent developments in my life, however, have
allowed me to appreciate Eliot’s poem in a surprisingly personal and tangible
way. Indeed, my perspective on the world has changed forever thanks to two
life-altering endeavors: applying to colleges and watching PBS travel videos.
The college application process forced me to reflect on my life goals endlessly
until I felt like the center of some scholarly universe. My body, rejecting
this feeling like the stomach rejects rocks, felt a sudden urge to binge watch
PBS vacation-planning programs. Luckily, while catching up with the history of
Ancient Rome and modern tourist sites, I was reminded of how large and how
filled with other narcissists our world and history have been. Today, I find
the character of Prufrock to be a representation of a pandemic mental condition
in the Western world -- being so immersed in a culture that idealizes great
people of the past that a person is kept from being content with his or her own
life. Ultimately, Prufrock’s own unhappiness forces the reader to consider
whether greatness should be aspired to at all.
Throughout his poetic ponderings,
Prufrock references historical figures and artwork legendary in Western civilization,
clearly defining what he believes a man should aspire to be. While the first
stanza establishes Prufrock’s less than luxurious lifestyle, describing his
nights spent in “one night cheap hotels” (6), the second stanza introduces a
seemingly tangential idea: “In the room the women come and go/Talking of
Michelangelo” (13-14). In our initial examinations of this poem, I failed to
understand fully what relevance Michelangelo had to the piece. In my moment of
need, however, a well-timed PBS show titled "The
Best of Europe: Rome’s Ancient Glory and Baroque Brilliance" opened my eyes.
The show focused on the works of architecture and art throughout the city: the
millennia-old marvel of the Pantheon, the elaborate buildings built to
memorialize ancient emperors, and even the sculptures and paintings by
Michelangelo himself. As I watched PBS travel guide Rick Steves tell me about
these impressive cultural attractions, I was fixated on how great they all were. These were true
feats of their times, and surely remain some of mankind’s greatest creations! I
admired and envied Michelangelo for being so darn good at seemingly everything,
and for being so famous for it. Similarly, Prufrock repeatedly notices that, as
he is living his life of mediocrity, Michelangelo manages to still be the talk
of the town centuries after death. Prufrock wishes to be remembered the same
way Michelangelo is, and the presence of such “great” figures in his everyday
life is inescapable. Despite Prufrock’s continued assurances that “there will
be time” (23) for him to find his place in society, a second mention of the
women discussing Michelangelo reveals the urgency Prufrock truly feels. As he
grows older and older, dappling in constant new “visions and revisions” (33) of
his life, the ghosts of the greats like Michelangelo loom greater, becoming
even more difficult to live up to. Rather than enjoy the creations of the past,
Prufrock feels increasing pressure to be “great,” just as we today live in the
shadow of celebrated cultural figures, past and present. Amidst the college
application process, as I feel strangely pressured to live up to societal
standards even in choosing where I go to college, I can certainly relate.
Though his life has not turned out
how he had expected or hoped, Prufrock is still cognizant of some virtue in his
life of simplicity—he briefly accepts that he may not be great, but he can
still benefit his society. During a lengthy bout of existential questions,
Prufrock asks, “And would it have been worth it, after all/After the cups, the
marmalade, the tea.../To have squeezed the universe into a ball.../To say: I am
Lazarus, come from the dead…” (88-89, 93, 95). Prufrock notes that he has done
much in his life that he does not regret: enjoying simple pleasures like drinking
tea and eating a marmalade spread. Such small moments as these have been the
truly memorable ones for him, not those when he was progressing further in a
career. If this is true, he wonders, was there any incentive to try to squeeze
the world to fit into his own narrow goals, or to become so great as the
biblical saints like Lazarus?
*Prufrock may have not
lived a life of greatness, but he has certainly enjoyed what Rick Steves refers
to while sipping tea at quaint markets overlooking the Mediterranean as “the
good living.” Prufrock has had the opportunity to live a life of goodness, of
simply enjoying time without feeling the need to gain more fame and riches.
However, until this point, he has not been able to appreciate this opportunity
because he has been taught by his society that lack of ambition is synonymous
with failure. He goes on to admit, “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to
be;/ Am an attendant lord, one that will do/ To swell a progress, start a scene
or two” (111-113). Prufrock seems ready to embrace a role in society he never
expected to: that of the common man. After all, even if a select few historical
figures lead and shape movements, it is ultimately the everyday people, the
side characters, who have to make the movements move anywhere — Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he reasons, would have no plot
if Hamlet were the only character.
After I applied to
college and, in the process, made myself overdose on narcissism from all of my
supplemental essays describing what a promising and incredible specimen I am, I
found in these PBS travel videos the same feeling that Prufrock has. I was sick
of trying to be a great, superlative college student; all I wanted was a nice
view and a cool culture to experience while floating around in a Venetian gondola.
I didn’t feel the need to be Michelangelo, as long as I could occasionally go
to the Sistine Chapel and give him an imaginary pat on the back. I considered
this desire more of an entertaining dream than anything I would actually
consider doing in the near future.
And, wouldn’t you
know it, so does Prufrock. While he does decide that his dreams of greatness
are no longer achievable, he also proves unable to let them go, and thus unable
to either achieve his goals or find happiness by straying from them. Although
Prufrock is glad to have experienced simple pleasures in the past, he is
resigned and depressed at the thought of living so normally in the future: “I grow old...I grow old.../ Do I dare to
eat a peach?/ I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach,”
(120, 122-123). Prufrock will endure, rather than enjoy his retirement of long
walks on the beach, for he feels he has still not earned anything in his life.
He is so mired in disappointment with himself that he even doubts whether he is
worthy of eating a peach; surely, he thinks, such bounties of the earth were
meant for people greater than he. Prufrock has grown old pondering his
indecisions, and now he believes it is too late to bother deciding any of them.
He concludes his
thoughts on a nihilistic note: “We have lingered in the chambers of the
sea.../Till human voices wake us and we drown,” (129-131). To him, there is no
point in attempting to achieve greatness in the eyes of his society because he
has romanticized even the greats themselves: had he been more critical of the
works of Michelangelo and Shakespeare, he would have realized sooner that their
lives were no more meaningful than his. Now that he can see past the
transcendent artwork his idols created, hear their real “human voices,” he
understands that they were just as depressingly imperfect as he is. Any higher
moral values they chose to communicate in their art were not the rules they
themselves lived by, but the rules that they knew they should have been living
by and weren’t. Hopeless, Prufrock submits to drowning in time, letting himself
be flushed away just as the supposed greats of yore had been centuries before.
He convinces himself that what happiness he found in living the “good life,”
and what hope he maintained as he sought the “great life” were both equally
pointless. He believes he has been, to this point, constantly romanticizing the
world and his place in it, much as I did while watching travel videos and
taking in the gorgeous Mediterranean vistas. There is no point in seeking a
good life, he reasons, because his has built to disappointment.
Prufrock, stagnating in despair
after a life of indecision and disappointment, possesses the most dramatic
version of the mindset that we all have in some capacity, or have had at some
point in our lives—the anxious, insecure mindset that arises from searching for
our places in a society that calls specific individuals great and tells all
others to try to become like these elite few. Indeed, I have always idolized
these figures myself, and wondered whether I could live up to their legacies in
some way. The question that so many of us high school seniors seem to be asking
ourselves right now is “Do I want to go to a college that seems fun and happy,
or do I want to try to get into one that’s prestigious and enviable?” Having
applied to upwards of ten colleges over the course of winter break alone, I
have now become able to find significant meaning behind “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot’s Prufrock spent his life asking himself whether he
wanted to live the “good life” or the “great life,” and as a result achieved
neither. By tracing the development of Prufrock’s thoughts throughout the poem,
I have concluded that my most important goal in life is to not become like Prufrock. While migrating to a foreign country
based on the information I received from a one-hour TV program may be slightly too irrational for right now, I
do know that I must be decisive in all of my endeavors—some of these decisions
may even just be to sit back and relax for a day or two. The last thing I want
to do is waste another day sitting in my room and procrastinating writing
college essays the same way that Prufrock has, essentially, procrastinated his
whole life away.
*
As an initial exercise in developing our understanding of the poem,
each student creates a visual representation of a line, image, or stanza
from the poem that makes a strong impression on him/her. Our class
hangs these images on the wall in the order in which they occur in the
poem and listens to the poem being read aloud while looking at them.
If you read my blog post of about a week ago, you saw pictures of the sculptures that Scott has included in Darkness and Beauty, his M.F.A. show at JSC. The sconce you see at the left, which Scott recently gave me as a gift, is related to that work in terms of materials, subject matter, the presence of duality. It rounds a corner and looks in two different directions. Its two faces exist cheek-to-cheek, like close sisters or kindred spirits who sense each other through peripheral vision, actual or spiritual -- or like one person with two different orientations. And it feels to me like a near-perfect expression of my current situation: I am rounding a corner, but with such a strong sense of connection to the person and places I have been.
