Stimulus of new surroundings slowed time… in my sheets cozy lingered, as dawn arose rosy-fingered with rays reaching the narrow chinks of my eyelids through the blades of a whirring window fan. Distant train chugging, whistling, over sweet morning melodies pure and true from the trees outside. Dozing, didn’t set an alarm since my stomach would wake me… slight discomfort keeping me conscious of the time. Sunbeams climbing, illuminating the immediate objects in my room: desk, books, laptop, chair. Eyes closed again, I made a mental map that started with where the wall lay and the furniture stood, then left my room and went into the dorm hallways, past the bathroom, then outside and around campus to the half dozen buildings that I had been in so far, into the rooms where I had class, and downtown to a couple of stores that I had been to, each day filled in fog with more familiarity. My first priority was to plot the ubiquitous bathrooms, cleaned daily, soothing anxiety. Eyes open again, sunrays and stomach replacing the nudge of my mother when she said, “wake up, time for school,” with added help from a rush of excitement that pulled me out of bed with the knowledge that I was now dependent upon myself to rise and face the day with newly acquired force and aspirations from within.

            I awoke alone in the room, Paul already up and out. My first class at ten o’clock, an improvement from eight-thirty in high school, especially considering the commute was cut to five minutes. Feet underneath and flip-flops found, I walked fifteen paces down the hall to the bathroom, communal row of stalls, privacy not priority, “Porcelain Press” posted in line of my squat-seated eye, extra paper, read all about it: Junior David Stott, astronomy major, wins intern of the summer award at AccuWeather; If grades are your first priority, what’s number two? Submit your answer for a chance to win a free pizza; Doubleday’s Dilemma by Sophomore Phoebe Biddle wins short story contest, prize of $250 towards tuition. Flush. Turquoise tile and pink liquid soap, warm water from the sinks quickly change to cold, splash my face awake.

Back in my room, quick ready for class, books in bag and out through a succession of dorm doors and into a warm August morning with a fresh breath dew humidified, cushioned walking on the grass next to the paved path, past a girl sitting under the quad’s biggest tree for canopy, putting pen to paper in harmony with the moment, Gong, Gong, Gong… Ten times, the final strike marks the hour, pepping the step of the dalliers, front door to Founder’s Hall held open for me by someone with friendly features, “thanks,” flash of eye contact, a smile and a nod, swerved with pace towards her class. Up the stairs, through the classroom door, students speaking inter se, lecture not yet started, I found an open seat in the back near the window and took out my books and pen. Door opened, disheveled prof, wearing a sweater in the summer.

“Alright everyone, good morning.” Clamor calmed to a shuffling susurrus of whispers and pages.

“So, what did you guys think of The Waste Land?”

Fear death by water. Is that an answer? Contribute at least once this class.

“It was difficult to make sense of.” Gruff musculine voice in the second row.

 “Yes, I think that’s part of the effect that Eliot was trying to achieve. He wrote this poem in Europe on the backend of World War I. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?”

Tree of Heaven flourished, nourished by the paving stones. Quad out the window, she’s still writing. “He’s asking what beauty can bloom out of this mess that Western civilization has collapsed into, how do we construct meaning out of chaos?”

Easier to write in peace.

“This first section is told by a different narrator in each stanza, and Eliot continues to change perspective throughout the poem in attempt to imitate the disillusioned and depressed zeitgeist of Europe in the early 1920s.”

I thought they were roaring.

“A little biographical background: Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis to an upper-class family of British descent. As a child, he suffered from a chronic hernia due to weak core muscles, which meant he couldn’t be active and play with the other children his age, so instead he fostered a love of literature.”

Ah, he didn’t get out much, couldn’t flap to the jazz.

“He graduated from Harvard with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy and then moved to England shortly after the start of World War I, becoming a first-hand witness of the detriment caused to Europe by the Great War and its thunderous reverberation throughout Western civilization. He finished The Waste Land in 1922, just three years after the Treaty of Versailles. Okay, back to the text, let’s break it down. What do we know about the narrator of the first stanza? Yes?”

“Her name is Marie.”

Tip taps on the pane, starting to rain, she’s gathering her stuff now.

“Good, and what do we know about where Marie lives?”

“In the mountains.” Walking north, maybe towards her dorm.

“I don’t think so, she’s recalling a peaceful scene from her childhood, before the war, that takes place in the mountains. Anyone else?”

Blank, forgetfuls now.

“Did anyone look up the Starnbergersee or the Hoftgarten?”

“Sounds like German.”

“Yes, German. The Starnbergersee and the Hoftgarten place her in Munich. You guys all have google right? Whenever you’re reading anything and there’s a word or name that you don’t know look it up, it just takes a second. If it’s a phrase, then you can google it within quotations to search for the exact phrase.”

Maybe my computer science teacher was right.

“It would take hours with this poem.” 

“It would be worth it. When I was in school, we had to look up everything in the Encyclopedia, which got outdated instead of updated, and if we needed more detail, we’d have to go through a file cabinet to find an index card with a call number.”

Slower process, but less distractions begging for attention in the background.

“Eliot made a lot of references because he was concerned with the Western cannon, fancied himself a tastemaker… This is slightly tangential, but let’s think about the concept of a cultural cannon for a moment, we all know the Greek epics, right? Epic poetry like Homer started as oral tradition, memorization was made easier by rhythmic meter, like how you guys know all the lyrics to pop songs, right? A poem like The Waste Land that doesn’t have rhyme or meter is much more difficult to memorize as there are no mnemonic helpers. So at first, in order for stories to survive, they would have to be told to and memorized by the next generation or else they would be lost forever, but then papyrus came along, invented by the Egyptians using the papyrus reed that grew along the Nile, which allowed stories to be written down. But papyrus is pretty fragile and would get destroyed by damp conditions, or it would wear out and fall apart over the course of a century. So then someone from the next generation would have to transcribe a book by hand, and if the book failed to stay relevant and fell out of favor with the zeitgeist, the scribes wouldn’t think it was important enough and it would be lost forever, unsalvageable for future generations. Then parchment comes along, which is made out of treated animal hide, usually cows or sheep, and that further extends a story’s shelf life, though it is cumbersome, very expensive to make, and does not roll up into a scroll like papyrus. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe stopped trading for papyrus with the Egyptians, and European society stopped writing things down and transcribing old manuscripts, so a lot of information is lost during the period that we call the Dark Ages, which was also marked by instability and warfare, leading to further cultural destruction. The fact that the Book of Kells survived in feudal Ireland, while Vikings and other invaders destroyed monasteries and villages, is probably a divine miracle. We’ve lost the majority of Greek classics, like Homer’s comedic Margites, as well as about two thirds of Aristotle’s body of work, over a hundred plays by Sophocles, and countless other tragic losses. Eventually, the Chinese invented paper, which is cheaper to make than parchment, and so it slowly made its way into Europe and became the most popular writing material.” Praise be to the internet, the great archive. “So, back to The Waste Land, Eliot is keenly aware of the importance of a canon that prescribes which texts are important and should be passed down to future generations. In quoting or referencing these sacred texts while documenting the period after World War I, which probably felt like a new Dark Age, he is trying to ensure their survival by transcribing them into the modern era. In order to fully understand The Waste Land, you would have to learn about all the referenced texts. He starts off by quoting the Satyricon, believed to have been written by Petronius in the first century AD. The quote is from a character named Trimalchio, who is hosting a dinner party and, due to incontinence, has just returned from the bathroom,” T eliot, toile T “and tells a story about finding the Sibyl of Cumae, a prophetess, trapped in a bottle, wishing to die, perhaps a relatable feeling after the end of World War I. And then, the dedication is a quote from Dante’s Inferno, which he will reference constantly throughout The Waste Land, since hell is the epitome of our conception of a dark Waste Land beneath the earth’s surface. The first line, ‘April is the cruelest month,’ is referencing the prologue of the Canterbury Tales, which starts with the line, ‘When in April the sweet showers fall,’ but in the Waste Land, April has changed, and the rebirth of spring seems unfeasible. The lilacs are reference to Whitman’s When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, which he wrote as a tribute to Abraham Lincoln after the American Civil War. It feels to me that his constant use of allusion is like he’s desperately clinging on to bits of meaning that had formerly constituted the structure of Western culture, like an English professor running around a burning library to save a few of his favorite texts before the whole thing collapses.”

“So, back to this first stanza, we find out that Marie is German, and her countrymen were the belligerents and they lost. Does that help explain why she would say April is the cruelest month?”

“Because you can hide in your cavern in winter, but in springtime and summer you are forced to go and interact with the world.” Girl in the first row, pale and platinum blonde.

“Okay, good, and what do we know about Marie’s social class, yes Sally?”

“She’s an aristocrat since she used to stay with the archduke.”

Intimidating assurance.

“Right, so her family was well off in her childhood, but has now fallen on much harder times. The archduke is probably Franz-Ferdinand, whose assassination forced Europe to get up off its anxious seat and to confront the menace that became World War I, and Marie is probably the Austrian Countess Marie Larisch von Moennich, who was a distant cousin of Franz-Ferdinand, and was someone whom Eliot had met and conversed with. Okay, who is the narrator in the second stanza?”

“The Hyacinth Girl.”

Pretty but poisonous, terrible beauty, flowers of evil, handle the Belladonna with protection.

“Actually, I think the Hyacinth girl is another memory, it’s the same format as the first stanza: present tense, quote in German, past tense.”

“So she’s also German?”

“Probably, right? Both of the quotes are taken from Wagner’s opera version of Tristan and Isolde, which is in German. What kind of mental state do you think this person is in?”

“Seems disillusioned by the war, life has lost meaning, neither living nor dead.”

“Like a zombie.”

The class chuckled which shocked awake the boy next to me who had been nodding off, thought they were laughing at him, looks like an athlete, he looked around and saw no one paying attention to him, then plucked a nose hair to give himself a jolt.

“Great, Eliot is describing the post-war apathy, all of the action finally stopped and the survivors were left to walk about the ruins. Fear in a handful of dust. Okay, stanza three…yes Jessica?”

“I think that actually this is really depressing because like when I think about dying before I go to sleep and stuff and what that will be really like, like how painful it will be, that like there’s no words for it, like nobody knows what happens when we die and stuff, and like how that makes me feel, because they say at my church on Ash Wednesday, to dust you shall return, and then they put ashes on your forehead and so that’s why I think he said fear in a handful of dust, cause that’s scary to think of.” Devil’s disease infectious, quarantined to the dusty desert.   

“Okay, good, yeah, our bodies decompose when we die and we don’t know what it’s like to not have a body, so fear of the unknown. Okay, stanza three, a little more straightforward, who’s the protagonist? Yes, Sally?”

“Madame Sosostris, she’s a fortune teller.”

Call me now for your free reading.

“And what fortune does she tell?”

“She shows us a bunch tarot cards, so I guess it depends on how you interpret them, but the hanged man and the drowned sailor don’t sound so good.”

Breathe underwater till the end, pearls that were his eyes, what has the sea changed my boat into? North Atlantic garbage patch I fathom.

“Right, the cards give a pervasive feeling of doom, in cohesion with the rest of this section. Even though the Great War is over, she seems to be predicting another one, maybe she can see destruction by air-raids in the next war, the blitz on London. Okay, and the last section, who’s the narrator?”

“An observant Londoner noticing the people on the London Bridge.”

My fair lady at the front, contributing again, I have to get a word in.

“Yes, good, he has his head up while the other men have their eyes fixed before their feet in a slow silent walk. They kind of sound like zombies as well, don’t they? Going through the motions somber and languorous with ennui, that refined monster. So this section takes place in London, which is mostly where Eliot was living while he composed The Waste Land, and there was a distinct shift from bucolic to urban life post-Industrial Revolution that Eliot and his contemporaries were commenting on. What is Eliot saying about city life?”

“Is he saying that cities are depressing?”

“Perhaps, though they could still be grieving after the war. Anyone else?”

Say something, class participation, give it a shot, hand raised, professor nods in my direction, “The population density has a uhm,” what’s the word, come on… “a dehumanizing effect on the individual, and also where he says ‘under the brown fog of a winter dawn,’ London is famous for its fog, and fog also represents depression, and so maybe that’s why they’re looking at their feet, because they can’t see what’s in front of them.” Phew.

“That’s right, the London fogs were called ‘pea soupers’ because they had a green-brown tint to them, caused by particulates from coal burning and other Industrial age practices that substantially increased air pollution. The smog could actually kill people with pre-existing lung conditions like bronchitis. And, like you said, pedestrians could not see more than a few feet in front of them, so they have to look at the ground to make sure where they’re going. Yes?”

“And they have to make money so they’re all trying to get from one place to another.”

“Uhm, okay, with the shift towards urbanization and industry the market forces of capitalism make themselves felt, which could add to the dehumanization. So, the painter Claude Monet did a series of paintings called the Houses of Parliament series, which beautifully portrays Westminster Palace looming over the river Thames on days with fog and without, I’m gonna bring a couple of them up on the projector, one sec…”

Looming castle muted over the river, a particular hush.

“There they are, so that one’s on a day with fog, and gives you an idea of the amount of hazy distortion that Londoners were dealing with. Eliot also complains of yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and he was right to complain about the fog and try to bring it to people’s attention because the fogs got worse throughout the twentieth century, culminating in the Great Smog of nineteen fifty-two, which killed at least four thousand people.”

New York had bad air in the fifties too, cloud city in sixty-six, also post nine-eleven, good to get out.

“So Eliot is using the fog and the London Bridge to paint this image of London and the industrialized city as a modern wasteland. Is that still how we think of cities today?” Hand up. “Yes?”

“Well, after World War II rich people moved away from the cities to the suburbs.”

The recent gentrification, I’ll go again, “But now people are reinvesting in cities after they bottomed out from the sixties through the eighties, but I don’t know why that is.”

“That’s a good question, there are probably a few contributing factors, I think society is wary of relying on gasoline and the automobile since the politically volatile Middle East controls the majority of the world’s gasoline production. Also crime rates are down in major cities, and people are starting to revalue cultural events and amenities. Now people associate the suburbs with ennui.”

“Could central Pennsylvania be a wasteland, with all of its defunct industry?”

Taxes too high, cheaper in China, buy the kids a happy meal.  

“I suppose parts of Pennsylvania could be seen as a primal garden lost forever, et in Arcadia ego, but Eliot’s Waste Land is urban, and I’d say we have a lot of natural beauty here.” The mind is its own place. “On the topic of industry and capitalism: the turmoil in the wake of World War One gave rise to a handful of revolutions inspired by Marxism and the Russian Bolsheviks who were victorious in uniting a rebellious proletariat to usurp the bourgeoisie and stop their exploitation.” Rasputin couldn’t stop the bleeding. “In many countries there had been a swell of political unrest in the decades prior to World War One, and the tax of the war on the national armies gave civil uprisings a chance to succeed. Combined with public access to electricity in urban areas and rapidly advancing technology such as the inventions of airplanes, automobiles, and telephones, World War One is the culmination of a period where all changed utterly in human life, and to which we will never return.”

Unless World War Four is fought with sticks and Flintstones.

“We have made a shift towards rational secularization, where our political leaders are separate from religious leaders and are chosen based on popular election as opposed to divine right. So, the turn of the twentieth century marks a distinct severance with the past which is why Eliot and his contemporaries were coined Modernists. Okay, does anyone have any questions?”

“What is postmodernism?”

“That comes after World War two. One way to differentiate would be that modernists believed art and philosophy could hold a mirror to reality, and they were aware of certain imperfections or cracks in their mirror, but the postmodernists thought reality far too complicated for any veritable replication, and thus their endeavors are much more self conscious of their disparity, so, for example, they are often self-referential and break the fourth wall.” Seven years bad luck. “In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty describes postmodernism as the evolution of epistemology into hermeneutics, which, in literary theory, is the change of study from author’s intent to reader’s interpretation. The book is in the library if anyone wants to take a deeper look into postmodern philosophy. Any more questions about the first section of the Waste Land?”

No hands raised, anticipating dismissal.

“Alright, so I hope this gave you guys a good introduction to the poem, meeting the different narrators. Their shifting perspectives are like the heap of broken images, glimpses into the minds of strangers without concrete connections, it’s supposed to have a jarring effect. Okay, for homework write a page about the differences between the two narrators in ‘A Game of Chess’ and a page about your first impressions of ‘The Fire Sermon.’ Bonus points for anyone who can find and explicate one of Eliot’s hidden allusions. I’ve had to correct a lot of your responses with the common mistake of citing an author’s words using past tense, as in “Eliot said,” but it should always be present tense, “Eliot says,” because the written word is not of an age, but for all time. See you all next week.”

The exodus is here: closed books, zipped backpacks, restless shuffle out the door and onto the quad, conversing and converging flock towards the student center. Try to find Paul.

           ID card swipe subtracts one of three meals a day, if you miss one it’s a sunk cost. Step forth and breathe in the bready air filled with noisy chatter and metal-plastic tapping, din of the dining hall. Clear plastic cup for the soda fountain; breakfast cereals assorted; bottomless coffee milk and sugared; soft serve machine with wafer cones, chocolate syrup, sprinkles on top. Meat and carbs: rolls and wonderbread for sandwiches with deli coldcut lineup and condiments; pale pasta, bright tomato globs, wood pulp parm; flaccid pizza; salad bar with anemic vegetables and shredded cheese, bacon bits, stale croutons, and saucy salad dressings; fruit bowl of plasticy red apples, neon oranges, highlighter yellow bananas. Endless refills at the eat-until-you’re-full buffet, then throw out all the leftovers and go to the bathroom, leave with toilet paper stuck to your shoe. A sophomore sitting at my table said he doesn’t eat the meat because of laxative preservatives.  

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