Friday afternoon. Dawn brought a snowfall to the area. We have not seen this much snow in a number of winters. My daughter-in-law and I dedicated an early morning session to shoveling. More is to come. Reason led us to clear the vehicles, then prepare to do the same again a few hours later. A snow day.

Between shoveling sessions I settled in to absorb more of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Eliot composed the poem in 1922. The mood of the language reflects the shock wave, that of psychic dismemberment, a result of industrialized warfare. The advent of machine guns, poison gas, and air war suggested that the age of machines was gathering momentum. Western society, the high culture of Europe, also the genesis of the horror of Flanders field is subjected to a shuttlecock of reflection and criticism by Eliot’s, The Waste Land .

A lot has been written about the poem. I understand at the inception the piece was much longer. Ezra Pound was asked to edit and he did. The saying is, “less is more.”

I was curious to understand the Latin and Greek aphorism used by Eliot to preface the poem.

‘Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: άποθανεîν θέλω.’

The lines come from a comedic manuscript, The Satyricon, by Gaius Petronius.  The Sibil was an oracle who presided over the shrine to Apollo at Cumae.  The story is told in The Metamorphoses by Ovid. Here is the rendering by Wikipedia:

Although she was a mortal, the Sibyl lived about a thousand years. She attained this longevity when Apollo offered to grant her a wish in exchange for her virginity; she took a handful of sand and asked to live for as many years as the grains of sand she held. Later, after she refused the god’s love, he allowed her body to wither away because she failed to ask for eternal youth. Her body grew smaller with age and eventually was kept in a jar (ampulla).

Using the tale in his Satyricon, Petronius has the Sibyl reduced to a miniaturized tourist attraction in a jar.  The narrator says that he saw her asked by passerby boys, ‘Sibyl what do you want?’  Her answer: ‘I want to die.’ (άποθανεîν θέλω)

This somber quotation offers a clue to the texture of emotional picture the poet seeks to create by means of language.  The suggestion is developed, the West’s fascination with Science, the development of technology without limits is a violation of the inviolable, even if ambiguous circumference of what it means to be homo sapiens.

By all appearances when you believe that it’s almost Paradise, what then, if it turns out what you want most is to die. Perhaps we ought to entertain the possibility more so now than in Eliot’s time.  Many generations and wars later, climate warming is a fact. There is little doubt – the Earth cannot withstand the carbon footprint of my customary way of life. The world cannot stay the same.

I must cut back on a lot of things.