Do I dare to eat a peach?

I did not have a particularly good day today. I don't know why -- perhaps there was no reason why -- but I felt a bit out of step with the world around me.

Maybe I should blame it on T. S. Eliot. You see, I read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock on my lunch break and, as always, the poem left me feeling a little empty. I suppose you could say it made me feel like a "hollow man" after I had read it.

I don't know what it is, but so many phrases reverberate in my soul when I read Prufrock. Today it was the following passage that spoke to me:

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 tea.

I just watched a couple of television shows. One is fairly good. One is filler, shlock fit only to kill an hour until my preferred show comes on. Neither is capable of affecting me the way these nine lines did. Both are forgotten a mere half hour after their completion. Eliot, on the other hand, haunts the chambers of my very being.

There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. Did Eliot imagine that all these years later we would live in a world that encourages us to prepare faces to deal with one another? Would he be sad to discover that each of us dons masks each day, as if there is no other way to face the world?

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 tea. Imagine the odds that Eliot would foresee my life in such detail. How comforting to know that he could imagine a world with such possibilities that the greatest challenge is to choose the dream to pursue.

I wish I could be like Prufrock, able to say, "I heard the mermaids singing, each to each", even if they did not sing for me any more than they sang for him. But today, I do not hear mermaids. Today, I only hear Prufrock as he leads me on through half-deserted streets.