L’horloge

While at Barnard College, I had the privilege of sitting in on a First Year English class of which the students and teacher were very welcoming and inviting. The class was discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and had a plethora of wonderful ideas about the poem, which, of course, caused us all to go off topic into a conversation about time.

The Waste Land is a commentary on the futility and hopelessness of a Post-World War I era. Time is cyclical here. The month of April is the transition from winter to spring when ice begins to melt and plants begin to grow. Eliot describes the difficulty to grow something beautiful and worthwhile out of barren soil in the first days of spring. The people play a game of chess amidst this phenomenon with a proprietor telling them to “HURRY PLEASE IT’S TIME” like a clock in his precision.

Humans use time as a crutch because otherwise we would be lost. We would wake during the day and sleep during the night with no knowledge of how far we are from birth and how close we are to death. Furthermore, time fosters efficiency. The more we advance and compartmentalize our lives, the more we need to organize our time. Losing time is scary. There is a mental clock reminding us that we have 5 minutes to finish a project and fifty years until we die and slowly, slowly, quickly, quickly time falls away and we creep closer to the end. As the professor teaching the class said, “We don’t want to waste time, but we don’t want to become a slave to it either.”

As a student brought up, when Edison invented the light bulb, he thought he would be eradicating sleep from society, therefore optimizing efficiency. We were taught that “time and tide wait for no man” and to waste time doing anything that doesn’t return on its investment is failure. We were taught that success is to, in the words of Mad Men’s Pete Campbell, “own a house, a car, a television, the American Dream!” A postcard perfect life in a neatly organized suburb is success. We don’t spend time relaxing or processing. That would be wasting time when we could be buying more, earning more, proving ourselves more worthy to others. Even our entertainments are optimized for efficiency from the television to the iPod to the iPhone, which I suppose is all in one.

Would Eliot see us as a cultural wasteland? Would it be because, as he portrayed in The Hollow Men, we don’t stop and think and feel? Is it worth it to ration our time “wisely”? Is there a purpose to time when it becomes repetitive and monotonous? Perhaps The Waste Land applies to us now more than ever as we try to make sense of a new society. Has time become a prison for which there is no key? I think our most human and pervasive fear is the feeling that we don’t have enough time, and I suppose the reason we don’t have enough time is because we don’t want to waste time. Eliot “show[ed] you fear in a handful of dust” so look it in the eyes and see if you recognize it.