to prepare a face to meet the faces I will meet

T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and learning to live with questions

In 1914, the 26-year-old graduate student T.S. Eliot exploded onto the English literary scene with his breakout poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, a long, strange, and lyrically delightful poem steeped in modern existential angst that has long been a staple of many a high school English class. Not mine, however.

In fact, it wasn’t until more than a decade after high school that I first made my acquaintance with the fictional Mr. Prufrock, thanks to a co-worker, Caely, whose seriously impressive party trick was reciting this 130-line, 19-stanza poem from memory. Respect.

I think the fact that I heard this poem before reading it, and very likely because I heard it from a friend who brought her own love and voice to it, helped pique my interest in this otherwise conundrum-ey verse. Certainly, there must have been some mnemonic power in its few sing-song rhymes, which apparently furrowed into my auditory hard drive, because that is how it resurfaced recently.

About once a month, I like to drive the ~15 minutes (sans traffic) downtown and work from the Portrait Gallery or the National Gallery instead of from my home office. Usually, this amounts to working in unremarkable basement-like spaces where the WiFi is stable. Still, it allows me to encounter high ceilings, natural light, and beautiful artwork on my way in or out of the building, on a break, or what have you.

On my last visit, as I was taking a quick lap through a small gallery with the Vuillards (Note: not Michaelangelo) I saw a small group of friends chatting and wandering through the galleries nearby and out of nowhere, from somewhere deep in the mental archive, this bouncy couplet trotted through my brain: “In the room the women come and go / talking of Michaelangelo”.

What is that? I thought. What is that from? It rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it.

Thankfully, Google had no trouble doing so, and within a few hours, I was wholly preoccupied with old J. Alfred.

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There are about a jillion things I could grab hold of in this densely rich poem to comment on:

• Its humor and playful, punctuating rhymes (“I grow old… I grow old… / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”);

• Its rich imagery (“The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes / Licked its tongue into the corner of the evening”;

• Its pitch-perfect diction and subtle alliteration (“The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase”);

• Its wonderfully evocative repetition (“For I have known them all already, known them all / Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons”).

Yet as I’ve reacquainted myself with this poem, and read what others have to say about it, I’m struck by how abidingly resonant and relevant his first-person angst is today, 110 years after its debut. There’s no question our hyper-globalized, high-tech world is vastly different from the one Eliot inhabited with clickety-clack typewriters and many who still thought it appropriate to “dress” for dinner (I don’t think even the most upscale athleisure wear would’ve cut it).

But, for me, his astute recognition that our most weighty, persistent, and perplexing questions of meaning and identity run parallel to mundane everyday experiences feels as timely as ever. Whether they come nested awkwardly amid “toast and tea” (Line 34) or unsatisfactorily as we are “settling a pillow” (Line 107) and seeking to be more clearly understood by our bedmate, one invitation baked firmly into Eliot’s verse is the perennially human question: What is one to do with all these unanswerable questions?

One ambiguous response Eliot offers is the observation that “there will be time”, a refrain he renders as both solace and despair. Solace in the ways that time grants us freedom and space to live into our existential queries through the ordinary events and experience of life: “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 revision”. Time also, he wittingly observes, for us to fake it and experiment as needed, or, as he writes, “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”, which I read as a rather clever dig/witness to all the posturing and presentation that punctuates our pitiful efforts at profundity.

Yet, the recognition that “there will be time” also brings a sense of weariness and despair. Through the ambiguous (and at times unintelligible) meanderings of Mr. Prufrock’s inner dialogue we gain a vague sense of all the daunting questions he carries with him that he can’t quite articulate and, by extension, may begin to recognize some of our own.

In the very first stanza Eliot introduces the idea of “an overwhelming question” (Line 10) and while never defined, (Oh, do not ask “What is it? / Let us go and make our visit.”). This idea of a question that cannot ever be adequately answered, or even articulated - only mildly suppressed or sidestepped as one goes about the day - sets the frame for a jumble of similarly obtuse but pressing questions that litter Prufrock’s mind as it unfolds across the poem, such as:

• “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

• Do I dare / disturb the universe?

• So how should I presume?

• And how should I begin?

• And would it have been worth it after all?

Like any poem, there is no one definitive reading. Part of its enduring appeal is its texture and timelessness which leaves it open to fresh interpretation from each new reader. Still, I am haunted (in a good way) by its question about our questions and its insistence that we grapple with them, knowing there will never be a most convenient time to do so.

While we may never reach a wholly adequate or complete answer this side of heaven, there is much wisdom and value in learning how to better “live into” our questions with greater honesty and curiosity trusting that as we lean into them we may discover insights that help us along the way or, even better, we may encounter others who share our angst or inquiry and can accompany us in our confusion and questing so we need not, like poor old Prufrock, bear that burden alone.