NOTES

Eliot completes The Waste Land with his own detailed end notes. They inform. I am not convinced they illuminate, nor were intended to do so.

He published The Waste Land in 1922. The ravages of the Great War must surely have informed the pessimism - perhaps fatalism is better - of the poem.

Five million died in Povolshye famine of 1921-1923. Did Eliot notice? The Holocaust, Dresden, Nanking, Hiroshima, the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria and much more were still to come.

Sigmund Freud wrote, also in 1922, "The facts that have led us to believe in the supremacy of the pleasure-principle in psychic life also find expression in the hypothesis that there is an attempt on the part of the psychic apparatus to keep the quantity of excitation present as low as possible..."  Perhaps the waste emerges from this tension.

There is waste and worse. We are a cruel race, especially rough with beauty which we typically break or bury alive.

And yet, I have mostly argued alternatives.

Beauty abides side by side our cruelty.  We love and murder with similar intensity.  A man conceived and constructed London Bridge and Magnus Martyr, even as other men displaced one and interred the other.

I am slightly embarrassed to admit, the single most powerful literary influence on my actual living is The Secret Garden (1911).  There is profound neglect, horrible loss, deep separation.  There is also beauty reclaimed, life restored, and wholehearted love known for the very first time.

Brokenness and healing are each real.  Choice is not the only source or cause.  Choosing the good, the true or the beautiful does not ensure our claim.  But without choosing, the default is decay.

“Might I," quavered Mary, "might I have a bit of earth?”