Friday Memories of Books That Shook My World
I recall exactly where I was when I first encountered T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At Sewanee Military Academy we sat for lunch at tables with an officer and a faculty member. I was a first-year student, still shocked by the drills and how we sat at attention before we were allowed to eat. Suddenly, however, I overheard the officer and the teacher, who taught senior English, talking excitedly about a poem.
I can’t remember if they were exchanging the line about the evening being spread out “like a patient etherized upon a table” or the line about the women who “come and go,/ Talking of Michelangelo.” In any event, I sensed I was in the presence of elegance and sophistication. I wanted to be part of a community that had such discussions.
Why would I, at 14, be captivated by a poem about someone undergoing a midlife crisis? After all, much in the poem eluded me. For instance,
–What’s up with restless nights in one-night cheap hotels (I know now)?
–What’s the big thing he wants to get off his chest and why does it somehow involve lonely men in shirt-sleeves?
–What’s all this talk about peaches, men’s hair styles, and trousers (rolled, flannel)?
I also didn’t relate to the high society in which Prufrock moves. The women in my life didn’t wear floor-length gowns, stretch out languorously on couches, and have arms that were braceleted and white and bare (but in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!).
I did know, however, what it was like to lie etherized upon a table (when I had my tonsils out) and so picked up the grogginess he is observing.
I knew about second guessing oneself constantly.
While I knew Eliot is overstating things when he asks, “Do I dare disturb the universe,” in one’s teens one simultaneously feels utterly insignificant (a pair of ragged claws) and the center of everyone’s attention. At that age, you feel that people’s eye pin you to the wall, leaving you wriggling.
“They will say…,” Prufrock says repeatedly, and the teenage you figures that of course everyone is talking about you.
Also at that age, you know how hard it is to say “exactly what I mean” and how impossible it is to be understood. (“That is not what I meant at all;/ That is not it, at all.”) The people around you, you sense, are snickering, even though you are too young for the Eternal Footman to have gotten into the act quite yet.
In short, people are constantly bringing your head in on a platter, even though you have tried to stay in the shadows.
Although you may be a bit obtuse and somewhat of a fool, however, deep down you have beautiful longings. It’s comforting that both you and Prufrock know that, somewhere out there, mermaids are singing. For a moment you hear them.
Then reality comes crashing in and you drown.
Except that you don’t entirely because you’re a teenager and the world is always renewing itself. You’re also constantly being surprised by, for instance, a conversation that reveals a new poetic world. While I understood that Eliot sees those Michelangelo-quoting women as snobs without substance, I wanted someone out there with whom I too could converse about high culture. I mocked and envied at the same time.
One other recollection. When I was a senior the teacher (another one by then) started analyzing the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Dangling Conversation.” When he got to the line, “And we sit and drink our coffee,” I piped up, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Genuinely pissed, he looked at me and burst out, “Bates, why are you so damn smart?!” I had no idea what had irritated him until I realized he was using the song to ease us into “Prufrock.” To set us up for the women talking of Michelangelo, he was preparing to point out the stanza,
And you read your Emily Dickinson
And I my Robert Frost
And we note our places with bookmarkers
That measure what we’ve lost
In short, I had ruined his lesson.
But not the urgency of the poem, which had the potential to impact people our age. Despite Prufrock being a slightly balding middle-aged guy who feels his life is a failure, his anxieties were our anxieties. Add to that its wonderful rhythms, its conversational tone, and its punchy lines, and the poem seems perfect for angst-ridden teens.
Previous Posts of Books That Shook My World
Tell-Tale Heart Terrified Me as a Teen (Oct. 30, 2026)
Why I Hated Catcher in the Rye (But Not Any More) (Oct. 23, 2026)
The Iliad Saved My Freshman Year (Oct. 16, 2026)
At 12 I Fell in Love with Taming of the Shrew (Oct. 9, 2026)
Alice Captured My Childhood Anxieties (Oct. 2, 2026)
How Tintin Gave Shape to My Sense of Wonder (Sept. 25, 2026)
E. Nesbit’s Formative Moral Influence on My Life (Sept. 18, 2026)
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)
