"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"
  by T.S. Eliot


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...
Oh, do not ask, "what is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides long the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions, and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room women come and go,
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "do I dare?', and, 'do I dare?'
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair --
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the
Chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say: 'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all--
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days, and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl,
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

. . . . . . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired .. or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all'--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the
Floor--
And this, and so much more?--
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
'That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.'

. . . . . . . . .

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,
Deferential, 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 to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us and we drown.

From Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye:

(p.3):

     Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.  If you can bend space you can bend time also, and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backward in time and exist in two places at once.
     It was my brother Stephen who told me that, when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spent a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it.  I didn't understand what he meant, but maybe he didn't explain it very well.  He was already moving away from the imprecision of words.
     But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.  You don't look back along time but down through it, like water.  Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing.  Nothing goes away.

(p.242-243):

     Cordelia will see this piece in the paper, and maybe she will laugh.  Even though she's not in the phone book, she must still be around here somewhere.  It would be like her to have changed her name.  Or maybe she's married; maybe she's married more than once.  Women are hard to keep track of, most of them.  They slip into other names, and sink without a trace.

(p.285):

     "I'm sorry," I say.  And immediately I am, I'm indignant, how could she do that to him, the cold unfeeling bitch.  I side with him, despite the fact that I did the same thing to him myself, years ago.

(p.385-386):

     There are no avocado and sprout sandwiches, the coffee is not espresso, the pie is coconut cream and no worse than it was then.  This is what I have, coffee and pie, sitting in one of the purple booths, watching young people exclaim about what they think is the quaintness of the past.
     The past isn't quaint while you're in it.  Only at a safe distance, later, when you can see it as décor, not as the shape your life's been squeezed into.

(p.387):

     I was unfair to him, of course, but where would I have been without unfairness?  In thrall, in harness.  Young women need unfairness, it's one of their few defenses.  They need their callousness, they need their ignorance.  They walk in the dark, along the edges of high cliffs, humming to themselves, thinking themselves invulnerable.

(p.397):

     Worse: although I'm afraid of this idea and ashamed of it, and although in the daytime I find it melodramatic and ludicrous and refuse to believe in it, I also cherish it.  It's like the secret bottle stashed away by alcoholics: I may have no desire to use it, right now, but I feel more secure knowing it's there.  It's a fallback, it's a vice, it's an exit.  It's a weapon.

(p.409):

     Some of the porches have pumpkins on them, carved with faces, happy or sad or threatening, waiting for tonight.  All Souls' Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious.  I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted.  They won't get homemade popcorn balls any more though, or apples: rumors of razor blades abound, and the possibility of poison.  Even by the time of my own children, we worried about the apples.  There's too much loose malice blowing around.
     In Mexico they do this festival the right way, with no disguises.  Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the graves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul.  Everyone goes away happy, including the dead.  We've rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to name them, we refuse to feed them.  Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to hear, and hungrier.

(p.420):

     "Well, what do you know. I don't know why I saved that," says my mother, with a little laugh.  "Put it on the throw-out pile."  It's squished flat; the red plastic is split at the sides, where the sewing is.  I pick it up, push at it to make it go back into shape.  Something rattles.  I open it up and take out my blue cat's eye.
     "A marble!" says my mother, with a child's delight.  "Remember all those marbles Stephen used to collect?"
     "Yes," I say.  But this one was mine.
     I look into it, and see my life entire.

(p.434-435):

     "I loved your early work," she says.  "Falling Women, I loved that.  I mean, it sort of summed up an era, didn't it?"  She doesn't mean to be cruel, she doesn't know she's just relegated me to the dust heap along with crank telephones and whalebone stays.  In former days I would have said something annihilating to her, some scabby, scalding remark, but I can't think of anything right off the bat.  I'm out of training, I'm losing my nerve.  In any case, what purpose would it serve?  Her past-tense admiration is sincere.  I should be gracious.  I stand there, my grin turning to stone, institutionalized.  Eminence creeps like gangrene up my legs.
     "I'm glad," I manage.  When in doubt, lie through you're teeth.  I'm lucky I still have teeth to lie through.

(p.445):

     This is what I miss, Cordelia: not something that's gone, but something that will never happen.  Two old women giggling over their tea.