Sam's Literary Personal Essay: "The Love Essay of S. Elliot Mazer"

[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.