Prufrock Revisited

Usually, when a year goes by, I find myself ruminating on the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s Time:

“…. And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same, in a relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, I never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.”

This year, it’s different. The trepidations of advancing middle age are behind me as I enter the bloom of being properly old.

So I decided to give another, much darker vision of aging a rerun, to analyse how my response to it has changed.

T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is a masterpiece.

It was written in 1915 when Victorian certainties – moral, religious, and social- were already in collapse, but before World War I made the collapse explicit.

I first read the poem, among Eliot’s Collected Works, back as a teenager studying at IIT Bombay, and continued dipping into it as I experienced romantic love and its travails, of losing my deepest anchor in life – my dad, of the ennui and disappointment of quotidian work, and the depredations of middle age.

Through all that, the poem resonated with me.

As a shy teenager, the poem seemed to me to capture the anxiety of being seen.

“They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”

While my teenage hair was far from thin, weren’t I too thin, my voice yet unbroken, and my facial hair playing truant?

As I segued out of college and the years passed, and I took on work and family responsibilities, the poem segued with me to reflect not just social anxiety but social pretense.  

“There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”

At a more intimate level, as the passion of youth dulled into the dull longing of middle age, the poem vibrates with erotic longing but never consummates it.

“Arms that are braceleted and white and bare/(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)”

And as the hallmark bitterness of middle age – the odor of barely passable success -colored my self-image, the poem’s resonance struck an even deeper chord.

The very opening lines signified the passing of yet another futile day laced with indignities.

“Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table;/ Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,/ The muttering retreats/ Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels/ And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:/ Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent/ To lead you to an overwhelming question…”

I remember now how long after I had re-read the poem in the dark night, the phrase “.. a tedious argument of insidious intent” would ring in my consciousness well into the morning.

Another set of pithy immortal lines, from later in the poem, would echo after the frequent incipient urge to destroy to create.

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

The poem’s penultimate paragraphs capture the abject resignation that so often marks the culmination of middle age.

“No! 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,/ Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,/ Defrential, glad to be of use,/ Politic, cautious, and meticulous;/ Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/ At times, indeed, almost ridiculous —/ Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old.. I grow old../ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers, and I walk upon a beach. / I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.”

I have recollected in the paragraphs above how Prufrock resonated with me as I passed from a callow teenager to a passionate romantic to an almost-defeated middle-aged man. Imagine my pleasant surprise when, on New Year’s Eve, as I reread the poem, it spoke to me only in the past tense. I had left Prufrock behind like an old friend with whom one has lost touch, and while recalling fondly, I feel no need to renew acquaintance.

Like I said in the beginning, the bitterness of middle age has passed, and the bloom of old age – nay, fresh maturity – is on me.

Over the past couple of years, after years of the practice of meditation and the discipline of regular exercise and mindful consumption, I have come to an understanding of the universe as a manifestation of human consciousness. The Vedas call it Maya; the secular world calls it Reality. And if we conscious beings are together manifesting reality, then there is a deep bond that unites us all. A bond that allows for striving but not attachment. We strive to keep the illusion of reality going. But attachment and covetousness are antithetical to the unitary bond between us at the very core of our existence. I love who I am today, and while I continue to love Prufrock, I’m glad to be detached from it.

When I re-read the poem the third time this New Year’s Eve, the final paragraph caught my attention. And as I put the book away and tried to sleep, I wondered what T.S.Eliot was alluding to in the poem’s final line.

“Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

Did he perceive that we wake to reality while being immersed in illusion?

PS: I strongly suggest you read and re-read Prufrock. You will find a resonance in it all your own.