2001-06-11 - 12:58 a.m.

Reexamining Eliot

Mmmm, weekend. Good food, good company, hardly anything useful accomplished. Except I cleaned my shower. For the second month in a row. When you set the bar low enough, it's easy to achieve your goals.

Other than indulging my fascination with World War II history, I've been rereading bits of Eliot lately.

Mechaieh knows poetry. I'm just a thug with delusions of intellect, but I know what I like.

The bit from Eliot that I most often quote to myself comes from Gerontion.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

I that was near your heart was removed therefrom

To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it

Since what is kept must be adulterated?

I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:

How should I use them for your closer contact?

I found that I react differently to Eliot than I did a few years ago. Being a parent apparently transforms one more than one realizes. I used to use Gerontion, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, and Ash Wednesday as an expression of my own depression. Now I seem to parse them as reminders of how not to feel. I used to feel Ash Wednesday's bit about "Because I do not hope to turn again" really deeply, but now it's just a memory. I do want to turn again. As Bujold might say, I want to see how things turn out.

I feel a little riduculous saying this now, being as how I fell into amazingly deep depression when I found out Julie was pregnant, but I can rejoice in having called it right way back then. I knew, as I lay there in winter 1998 wondering whether I should kill myself, that if I didn't I would never be that depressed again. So here we are, safe and sound, loving life except for minor things like hating my job and my apartment. Whee!

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