I love to crochet and listen to Adam Walker's lectures on YouTube. I don't think anyone else gives me the kind of hope that he does—hope in the power of art to spiritually sustain and transform us. His recent videos about T.S. Eliot have been wonderful.
I don't think I've ever shared the story about how Eliot's poetry just about saved me during one of the darkest times of my life. In the week after my father died in 2006, I could not read. It was such a shocking experience. I was 16 at the time. I devoured books. But in the aftermath of my father's unexpected death, I lost my ability to comprehend words. I would open my books, and I couldn't understand them.
One night, I decided to try and read one of my favorite poems at the time, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." My mother was asleep. I was alone. I read each word aloud, and I felt language return to me. The markings on the page came alive again. I was alive, too. Can you see me? Can you see me reading Eliot in the night, my world in ruins, my drowning body reaching for the surface? Can you feel my relief when I touched the words and knew again what they meant?
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
— T.S. Eliot, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
— T.S. Eliot, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— T.S. Eliot, from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"