Klara's Literary Personal Essay: "The Lovesong on All of Our Minds"

[Please note:  this essay is completely in italics as a reminder that it is Klara's work.  Klara, who is eighteen years old, gave her permission for her work and picture to appear here.]

After a few days of devastatingly chilly temperatures, a soft rain had drizzled away the remnants of snow and I was biking to school. Even though it was still dark, the air felt warmer and there was this beautiful fog on the streets and in the air. It wasn’t a lively yellow fog like in T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” but more of a soft gray. As I was biking down Bay Street I remember thinking about how normally fog only exists when you look at it from far away; it seems so tangible but disappears when you get close. This fog wasn’t like that, though. I saw it on the road ahead of me and expected it to disappear as I grew close, but it didn’t: it was there right up until I was in the middle of it. There are so many things we don’t understand until we’re in the middle of them. You could say life is like that, but we’re all on the middle of it, and none of us really has any clue what’s going on. How can we measure our lives? Do our little, everyday moments make us who we are, or is it the more important, decisive actions that define us?

I can imagine Eliot coming home after an evening out on the town, thinking of the prettiness of the fog even in the dreary streets, the weariness of his routines and regularities, the way people age and let their destinies fade. Already he struggles to recall the complexity of that feeling. He writes  “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in an effort to record it. I thought of the line from the poem in which the narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, contemplates the yellow fog as he journies through a deserted city:  “And indeed there will be time/for the yellow smoke that slides along the street...there will be time, there will be time...and time yet for a hundred indecisions/ and for a hundred visions and revisions” (Eliot 23-33). Prufrock’s walking down the street, thinking about the smoke and his life and probably a real jumble of things, and I was too, riding to school with this fog around me and this poem in the back of my mind. 

When I look at this line now, I know that I felt the same as the narrator. As I watched the smoke sliding along the street, I was mentally preparing myself to go back to school after a long vacation. I thought about all the little decisions and the actions that would fill my day before I get to the ever-distant lunch B, my version of Prufrock’s “taking of a toast and tea” (Eliot 34). Even as he ponders all the tiny things that make up his life, Prufrock takes solace in the knowledge that there will be time: time to make hundreds of little choices and hundreds of huge ones. His life stretches before him, all of the glory and the boredom and the indecision, all before he even has lunch.

As one gets older, the days seem to get longer but, in a funny trick, still manage to pass more quickly. A week is the work of a moment, a month is easily passed, three months are foreseeable. I think of years as cycles revolving around school, starting in September and ending in August. The school year is divided by strips of colors; the beginning of the year, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the winter, all of the vacations until it’s summer and then the whole thing starts up again. This year is different for me and my friends. We don’t know what’s coming next. Most of us don’t know where they’ll get into college, much less where we’ll end up. We’re contemplating the future, for we have so many choices ahead of us. There’s a lot of wondering “do I dare?” in my life right now. 

Arriving at his destination, Prufrock hesitates, asking himself, “Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” (Eliot 45-46) What he’s really asking himself is; can I leave my neat little orbit; can I upset the balance of things, if only slightly; can I change and make change? Do I dare do something other than the path that’s expected? I recognize Prufrock’s gravitation towards action as well as his fear of failure and the unknown. The universe is right there, do I dare disturb it? I love the diction Eliot uses there, because the word “disturb” is so powerful there.  If he had written, “Do I dare change the universe?” or “Do I dare upset the universe?” the meaning would have been so different. The alliteration with the two “d” words aids the flow of the poem, but more crucially the word “disturb” suggests the image of a small, fearful child prodding something much grander despite their fears. There’s no idealistic chatter about changing the way things are, or stirring them up-- the narrator is questioning if he, in his small way, can muster the courage to act.
 
I have the comic version of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Julian Peters taped up on my wall. My favorite panel is the one captioned “Do I dare disturb the universe," because I find it fascinating how Prufrock reaches out to something which is somehow both the door and a vast, starry universe. This duality is found everywhere in life. The universe manifests itself in monumental things like firemen saving a family from a burning house or somebody‘s being found innocent after a trial or an astronaut’s walking on the moon or an earthquake or the explosion of a far distant star. The universe can also be found in the smaller things: a baby’s speaking her first words, a friend’s biking to your house in the middle of the night, your favorite song on the radio or a new pair of socks. The universe is vast but it’s also a nervous man mustering the courage to knock on a door. [Image]

I dwell on the fading of life, the jadedness and the ennui. Prufrock claims, “I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...so how should I presume?” (Elliot lines 49-54). Prufrock has made the choice for himself-- he chooses to look at his life in terms of the coffee spoons, of the plodding times. I know it’s important to cherish your average days, because that’s what you’ve got in the end, but I don’t think that’s quite the answer. I eat the same thing for breakfast every morning: toast and butter. I take the same route to school every day. I sit in the same seat in class. I have an expected rhythm. 

*Variety is the spice of life, and I make an effort to season mine, but I worry sometimes that I can measure my life in Iggy’s bread. I close my eyes and think of the rows and rows of toast that I’ve consumed in my lifetime, and I worry that I have known them all, the evenings, mornings, and afternoons. I worry that I’ve experienced my best moments already, that they’re all pictures I tape to my wall and stories I tell, that I’m reaching my peak, and soon will start the gradual demise. My hair might not thin like Prufrock’s, but will I start wearing a “simple pin” instead of a kitschy necklace? I’m afraid of letting my best times slip by me; I’m afraid that these are my best times.

The only thing that you can guarantee about life is that it has no guarantees. No one can promise me that I still have my best times ahead of me, because that might not be true. There’s no way of knowing if I’ve already felt everything that I’m going to feel, or if I’ve already surmounted my peak. The only way that I can really ensure that I still have greatness ahead of me is to believe that I do, and live my life with that in mind. We are our great times and we are our feeble times, we are what makes us cry and what makes us laugh, and most of all, our lives are what we value in within them. 

* 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.