Disturbing the Universe in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot: Part 1

It was T. S. Eliot’s first published poem. Written when he was only in his early 20s, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” rode the crest of the wave of literary Modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an age of indecision and anxiety. The poem is the dramatic interior monologue of the title character, a middle-aged man whose passivity and ambivalence are threaded with artistic allusions, epigrammatic observations, and meditations on the nature of time, the fraudulence of relationships, and the risks of eating a peach. Should Prufrock dare disturb the universe? Should we? Wes & Erin analyze. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:08 Erin: It was T.S. eliot's first published poem, written when he was only in his early 20s. The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock rode the crest of the wave of literary modernism, predated World War I, and presaged an age of indecision and anxiety. The poem is the dramatic interior monologue of the title character, a middle aged man whose passivity and ambivalence character are threaded with artistic allusions, epigrammatic observations and meditations on the nature of time, the fraudulence of relationships, and the risks of eating a peach. Should Prufrock dare disturb the universe? Should we? Today we're discussing T.S. eliot's the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:05 Wes: And not all episodes of Subtext will appear here. subtextpodcast.com subscribe or by searching for us within the app itself. 1:20 Erin: So, Wes, for the longest time I called this poem the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock. In fact, up until like a week ago did I finally train myself out of it. And I. I don't know why, but I have. I always had such trouble with this title. And I think in hindsight, or maybe just sitting and, and thinking through the title and the awkwardness of that a little bit, it seems like maybe that's the reaction that I'm supposed to have. The, the inability to really know this guy's name or rather to trip over the awkwardness of his name, maybe. But I was calling it the wrong thing for a really long time. And I sometimes do that thing where I will call it the wrong thing and people will correct me and I'll ignore them and just persist. 2:03 Wes: So yeah, it's funny you say that. I. I have always had the same problem. In fact, I tweeted about this yesterday. Making a joke about how you did it was originally called the Love Song of J. Alfred Friendzone, but Eliot thought it would be too obvious. Yeah, I don't know if that joke really worked, but yeah, I have to look up, when I tweeted that I actually had to look up the name again. I have to do it every time. I have to look up the name to verify whether the J goes in the middle or up front. It's been that way since I first read the poem, which I probably read in high school. 2:38 Erin: Wow. 2:38 Wes: Why is it so hard to remember the order? 2:40 Erin: I think Alfred J. Prufrock has a little bit more music to it, if you can argue that. But having that one initial right up front kind of stops you dead for some reason. 2:51 Wes: He goes by his middle name, right. Alfred, which is, you know already. It's not the most fortunate name. Sorry. If there are any Alfreds listening to this, you know, and then it's a nerdy. There's a nerdy effect to it, I think. And then even the last name, it's goofy or whatever you want to call it. I think Prufrock was some sort of company. 3:10 Erin: Oh, I know what you're talking about. 3:12 Wes: Growing up or something. I don't think he said this. I think he just says it's made up. 3:16 Erin: He said he wasn't consciously thinking of that, but he must have picked up on that. He admitted he might have been influenced by seeing that and having it roll around in the back of his mind. 3:24 Wes: Yeah, this is when he was back in St. Louis. Yeah. So his family is from New England, but they ended up in St. Louis. His father had like a brick company or something. Yeah. And his mom was a teacher and also a poet. But yeah, I mean, apparently St. Louis in various ways was very influential on Eliot. But yeah, this title in particular seems to have come from the name of another company. It's a kind of. I don't know if arresting is the word for the title. It's a very memorable title. It's a good poem if you're going to make yourself famous at an early age. It's a good title to have. And this poem, I think he wrote it when he was 23, right? 4:08 Erin: Yeah, 22. Well, between 21 and 23 or something. 4:12 Wes: Yeah. 4:12 Erin: Yeah. 4:13 Wes: Which is interesting because it sounds like it's about a middle aged guy. 4:16 Erin: Right. 4:17 Wes: But he wrote this, I think, while he was in grad school and philosophy at Harvard, or maybe he was on a year abroad in France, I think he did a year abroad in France and he became friends with Ezra Pound, who became a big champion of his poetry. And ultimately, even though he finished his dissertation on idealism on this English guy, Bradley, who I think he directly studied under as well, he ended up not going back for the oral examination or whatever it was that would have ended up allowing him to complete his doctorate and become a professor. He was off to the races with poetry and left that to the side. But yeah, so this poem made a really big splash. I think Ezra Pound was excited by it because of its. It was considered avant garde in its time. It's sort of the quintessential modernist poem. Right. It's kind of near the beginning of a movement. It received a lot of resistance. There's an early review in which the guy calls him a drunken helot. So this guy, Arthur Waugh, in Quarterly Review, wrote something called the New Poetry. This review starts off, cleverness is indeed the pitfall of the New Poetry. There's no question about the ingenuity with which its varying moods are exploited. Its elaborate symbolism evolved and its sudden, disconcerting effects exploded upon imagination. I'm not sure if I like that image. Swift, brilliant images break into the field of vision, scatter like rockets and leave a trail of flying fire behind. But the general impression is momentary. There are moods and emotions, but no steady current of ideas behind them. Further, in their determination to surprise and even to puzzle at all costs, these young poets are continually forgetting that the first essence of poetry is beauty. And he compares it to cubism. And the reader will not have penetrated far before he finds himself in the very stronghold of literary rebellion, if not of anarchy. And then later on, after quoting something else. So this poem appeared in 1917, I think, in a little book of poems called Prufrock and Other Observations, which Ezra Pound helped get published. So after quoting from Prufrock, he says, here surely is the reduction to absurdity of that school of literary license which, beginning with the Declaration, I knew my father well, and he was a f fool, naturally proceeds the convenient assumption that everything which seemed wise and true to the father must inevitably be false and foolish to the son. Yet if the fruits of emancipation are to be recognized in the unmetrical, incoherent banalities of these literary cubists, the state of poetry is indeed threatened with anarchy, which will end in something worse even than red ruin and the breaking up of laws. A hint of warning may not be altogether out of place. It was a classic custom in the family hall, when the feast was at its height, to display a drunken slave among the sons of the household to the end that they, being ashamed at the ignominious folly of his gesticulations, might determine never to be tempted into such a pitiable condition themselves. The custom had its advantages, for the wisdom of the younger generation was found to be fostered more surely by a single example than by a word of homily and precept. And then Ezra Pound wrote a response to this called drunken helots and Mr. Eliot. So I don't think the reviewer will use the word, word helot, but I think after Ezra Pound's extremely feisty response and ridicule of this guy, and I think everyone assumed that the reviewer used the word helot. And so that kind of became a point of amusement among other reviewers who were defending Eliot. 8:00 Erin: I think that you said it was published in 1917 in a book, and it was, but it was first published in, I think June of 1915 in Poetry magazine, right? Well, actually, no, I think Portrait of the Artist as a Young man came out in 1914 maybe. I thought it was also 1915. And then pound did have that book of imagist poems that came in, I think, 1912. But Prufrock was certainly on the crest of the wave. I find that review to be really interesting and kind of true in a way. I mean, not in any way having to do with Eliot. 8:32 Wes: What? True in a way? But not in any true way. 8:34 Erin: But not in any true. Yeah, that's like the Parks and Rec quote with Patricia Clarkson playing Tammy, where she's like, in a way, yes, but in another truer way, no. But anyway, as you know, I'm an art history buff and I certainly think that Cubism and modernism are inextricably linked. But I think that the reviewer is right when he says that for poetry this is moving down a really destructive path. Cubism set art history on a path that ends in basically in complete and total self destruction. Like if you eliminate everything one by one, then in the end you'll be left with nothing. And then you have to build from the rubble of that. And I think that poetry kind of. I don't, I don't want to speak too grandly here, but you know, poetry kind of escaped that fate because eventually it, it swung back around into confessionalism. And I think confessionalism within that are the seeds of an even greater and more profound demise than, than was ever in modernism. But I think he does, he does sort of back his way into an interesting point about these destructive movements in art or like essentialist movements where you go down to the bare bones and then when you're done stripping everything away, there's nothing left. But it's certainly not true when it comes to Eliot, that, and it's kind of funny that, that he thinks that Eliot is not what he called reverent enough of his forebears, considering the fact that it begins with, you know, it begins with Dante, right. And, and is littered with his reverence for his forebears and also. 10:02 Wes: And it's something very important to Eliot and Eliot wrote about that, you know. 10:05 Erin: Right, right. 10:06 Wes: Relationship. 10:07 Erin: And I hope that we'll cover tradition and the individual talent at some point. 10:10 Wes: That would be really cool. I read that as part of my prep for this, but, yeah, we should do that. 10:13 Erin: Oh, really? Oh, I haven't reread that since college, but I remember loving it. 10:17 Wes: Yeah. He talks about the importance of seeing a. You know, the importance of influence and thinking of a contemporary poem as sort of part of this larger whole that is poetry. So, yeah, the guy that reviewer doesn't is not astute enough to get that, despite the fact that Eliot is innovative and more fragmented in the way that he writes than people are used to, it's not simply an abandonment of tradition. 10:40 Erin: Yeah, no. And not to give this idiot too much credence, but I'm simply saying that in a. You know, that I think modernism actually has a lot more of the tradition within it now. We have, I think, later movements after modernism started to abandon that tradition more and more. But at least when it comes to art history, he was kind of right. Just because in the 70s, you have this kind of nadir of, like, after Abstract Expressionism, where do you go? Anyway? There is a certain cul de sac quality in a lot of elements of 20th century art, but not in Eliot. I'd say Eliot is like the stay against that. 11:14 Wes: Interesting. Well, I think Ezra Pound overhyped the book. In all honesty, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is one of my favorite poems, and I think it's a great poem. Reading the whole book in preparation for this. It's not long. 11:27 Erin: Portrait of a Lady is that Portrait 11:28 Wes: of a Lady is great. Well, the Boston Evening Transcript is another brief little kind of playful poem that doesn't mark someone as being a great poet, in my opinion. So there are things of varying quality, I think, in that volume. But regardless, take my judgments with a grain of salt, obviously. But I can say, as far as my taste goes, my love of Prufrock does not extend to thus far to most of the other stuff I've read. So I also reread the Waste Land in preparation for this, and I remember having to read that in high school and having a friend of mine just bitch and moan constantly about the Waste Land. And it was just almost a recurring object of contempt. So what I can say now is I'm not advanced enough to fully appreciate probably some of this Prufrock. Like I said, I count it among my favorites. I Think it's exceptional. And I think when I say Pound was overhyping, I was thinking of the volume in general. And Eliot is just starting out right. Ezra Pound's like, oh, I'm gonna make you famous. You're the greatest. I don't think there's enough evidence at this point. Pound is really, really. It's a leap of faith in some ways for Pound. You know, he sees the greatness in some of these poems. 12:43 Erin: Sure. Well, I think Pound is kind of a serial over hyper. I mean, Eliot fascism, you know? Yeah, exactly. 12:50 Wes: But we kind of got into this because of the weird title and the 12:54 Erin: juxtaposition of the idea of a love song with this guy who sounds like a. I don't know, I think he would make a great sitcom character on like the Big Bang Theory or something like that. 13:06 Wes: Really? Why is that? 13:07 Erin: I don't know. He just sounds like his name. It just sounds like a guy with a pocket protector. 13:11 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 13:12 Erin: But then we have the excerpt from Inferno. 13:15 Wes: Yeah. So shall we just go through? We'll read a stanza and then comment and. We may run out of time to do all of that. But that started out. 13:23 Erin: Sure. 13:23 Wes: I've been looking forward to hearing you read the. Read the Italian here. 13:26 Erin: Oh, no. Are you serious? 13:28 Wes: Yeah, it's in Italian. How are you going to avoid reading the Italian? 13:33 Erin: Well, because I was just going to read a translation. I didn't practice. All right, all right. Sio credese che mia riposta fosse a Persona que mai tornase el mondo castafiama Staria senza Piuscose Ma percioque giamma di castofondo Nortono vivo alcun cioldo il Veronica senza terma di infamia ti respondo. So the translation that I have, which I got off the Internet somewhere, if I but thought that my response were made to one perhaps returning to the world, this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. But since up from these depths no one has yet returned alive, if what I hear is true, I answer without fear of being shamed. 14:16 Wes: So that guy is Guido da Montefeltro. What a name. 14:22 Erin: Great guy. 14:22 Wes: Speaking of weird names, probably not weird back then. Or maybe not weird 14:28 Erin: back then when everyone had those weird Italian names. 14:30 Wes: Yeah, I don't know what that was. Thank God. That's fast. But yeah. So Dante at this point is in the. This is from Dante's Inferno. At this point, he's in the eighth circle of hell for people who are being punished for simple fraud, fraud without malicious intent, which that sort of fraud is meant for the ninth circle. This includes counterfeiters, hypocrites, grafters, seducers, and this guy Guido, he's made entirely of flame. So when he talks about this tongue of flame would cease to flicker. He's not being metaphorical there, his tongue really is made of fire. So Guido's crime was to advise Pope Boniface to basically betray a certain family, to tell them that they were getting amnesty and to then to renege on the promise. And Guido basically has Boniface agree to absolve him of the sin in advance. So to get over his reluctance for doing that, which I think is significant. So I think our task here is to think about how is this relevant? How is fraud, and in particular this sort of fraudulent betrayal of the Colonna family in which there's preemptive absolution. How is that going to be relevant to the rest of the poem? 15:49 Erin: Yeah, there's a kind of a preemptive absolution within the telling of this tale too. Or in other words, there's a kind of like a short circuiting because Guido is only telling Dante this with the understanding that Dante can't tell anyone else. So he's sort of unburdening himself with the expectation that if he tells the truth about this or if he tells his tale, Dante won't be able to tell it to anyone else because no one's ever made it out of hell alive. So there's again, that kind of confessional quality which is conditional on the assumption that Dante will not make it out. 16:22 Wes: You know, there's a nice irony to this epigraph, right, because it's understandable that Guido might think, okay, no one's returned from hell, I'm safe telling this story and not, you know, I'm not going to ruin my reputation up on earth by telling it because Dante is never going to get back. But in this case, Eliot is in the position of Guido and we are in the position of Dante and Eliot is publishing this poem. And there's no question, right, that this publication is not a private communication to some listener who's going to keep his confidence, but that it's a potentially reputation ruining event and in particular an admission of some sort of fraud. 17:03 Erin: Yeah, I think you're right, but I think also that Eliot is Dante and Guido is Prufrock. So there's that. Is that what you said? 17:10 Wes: Yeah. No, I didn't, but I think you're right. Yeah. Because it can be read in several different ways. Yeah. 17:15 Erin: Right. So there's that. You Know, hiding behind dramatic monologue also, which is interesting. So there's this idea that Eliot is betraying Prufrock. 17:25 Wes: I see. 17:25 Erin: So of course Prufrock is his own invention, but it's allowing him to the Persona, which is something, of course, Pound was really into the idea of Persona and I guess Eliot is here. Like this poem just makes me think of Browning. The idea of the dramatic monologue can give you that kind of ironic distance from whoever you're writing about. Even as you're revealing personal things about yourself. You can say that it's through the prism of this character and in a way, betraying the character. 17:52 Wes: Now this is of course a much better reading than the one I just gave. This makes. Makes much more sense, yes. To think of Eliot as Dante and in this case betraying Prufrock, which in a way you can read as a self betrayal as well if you'd like. But yeah, that should be the primary reading. 18:08 Erin: And Guido is giving a kind of the tongue of flame. That's got to be the evil Holy Spirit, right? So there's a divine inspiration. Well, an inverted divine, maybe demonic inspiration that hovers over the whole painting. The whole painting? Sure, the whole poem. 18:27 Wes: So I just wanted to give a little foreshadowing of what I think the fraud might. And the preemptive absolution for it, what that might be, which is that it might have something to do with. There's a lot in this poem about social forms which are associated with these women in their rooms having polite conversation and deception that happens in our day to day social interactions. One might think of those things as fraudulent. And then the concept of preemptive absolution is that that's just what it means to be a nice person. So to lie to people, to say. Or essentially to conceal things from people so that you don't hurt their feelings, so you don't ruin the relationships. There's a great deal of deception that goes on socially, but it's kind of a noble lie situation. It's for a better end and that might be the preemptive absolution part of it. So that's a suggestion which I'm not sure that will bear out, but that was my first impression. 19:20 Erin: I like that. 19:21 Wes: Yeah. 19:21 Erin: Okay, so I'll read the first stanza. Imagine that I have the voice of a middle aged man. Or maybe I already do. Okay, let us go then, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. Let us go through certain half deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells, streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question. Oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit. 19:55 Wes: So famously, the first question is, who is the you that he's addressing in this poem? Is it himself? Is it the reader? Could we think of this as Prufrock addressing Eliot, his Dante, even given the. The way things begin? You know, my first reaction to this was that what you get from the first two lines, it sounds to me like the beginning of a. You know, it's called a love poem. And there's a kind of romantic feel to the first stanza, even after it takes a left turn and goes dark. Really, it's only the first two lines where you can maintain the illusion. It always starts out for me feeling like he's talking to a woman and that this is a night out, this is a date. And then later on you're left to wonder, could this be a male companion, as Eliot later on suggested when he was asked, is it Prufrock speaking to himself? And of course it can be all 20:52 Erin: these things at once to bolster your point of him speaking to a female companion. The romance of this first stanza, I think, comes from the fact that it actually begins with a decisive action, or maybe just the suggestion of a decisive action. Right? Like, let's go, let's do something. 21:10 Wes: You get the imperative mood here. 21:12 Erin: Right. And this is the only stanza, I think, that begins that way, that I think contributes to the romantic tone. Of course it's ironic because it's going to be undermined by the rest of the poem and whether or not one should do anything. And the love song itself, the fact that this poem exists at all is again a kind of a decisive act, though it's going to later be regretted if the epigraph is any indication. I agree with you that it seems like it's a woman. But then also I do kind of think to me it's Prufrock talking to himself, I think. I mean, of course I agree that it could be many things and probably is many things, but in light of the rest of the poem, this first stanza, I kind of read almost as like a self help kind of pep talk, you know, like he's ready to go out into the world and he has to bolster himself up a little bit in some sort of self helpy kind of. I guess this slightly prefigures Dale Carnegie, but that kind of idea, like okay, let's go. Let's do this. And that's why he has all this enthusiasm up front. Or if not enthusiasm, then at least just the desire to do something, which then peters out over the course of the poem. 22:11 Wes: Yeah. The way I like to think of this is almost as a dreamlike situation where it could start out as a female companion in the first two lines. And then it takes a dark turn where the sky becomes the patient etherized upon a table, which we'll talk about. And then suddenly he's wandering through. Maybe it's a red light district, you know, place where there's sounds like people with prostitutes, restless nights in one night, cheap hotels. He could be alone in that situation, talking to himself. He could be with a male companion at that point. Ultimately, of course, he's. It sounds much more, as the poem progresses, like he's just by himself, the companion disappears, or it's absorbed, it goes inside him, or he's abandoned. In some sense, I like the idea of thinking of, you know, because it's been set up with epigraph from Dante. I like thinking of the first two lines as in some way inspired by that. Right. So that it does sound like Prufrock is the Virgil here. He is the guide in some sense at first, but that quickly evolves into something else. 23:17 Erin: Yeah. And there is, because of this seedy quality too. It does seem like Prufrock, whether he's with someone or alone, we're meant to feel that his mind is tending in a certain direction. Even though the third line, the punchline of the first two, like a patient etherized upon a table, is the inversion, maybe of a romantic evening with this idea of the loss of consciousness and feeling going directly to sleep or being put to sleep rather than having a romantic time. 23:47 Wes: And I think this is one of the greatest metaphors of the English language. Yeah. Part of what's really interesting here is this idea of the evening spread out against the sky. Just a strange kind of doubling image. Is he referring to stars here? How is the evening exactly, spread out against the sky? Is it the darkness of the night that spread out against the sky? Yeah. This patient etherized upon a table part is wonderful because it suggests that the evening, far from being romantic, is sick and has been made temporarily unconscious. Or even. He'll mention Lazarus later on. Right. The idea of someone coming back from the dead, and the closest thing we have to that is putting someone under anesthesia for surgery, putting someone, you know, very as close to death as you could possibly get, and then reviving Them. So here in the very beginning of the poem, we have this idea of sickness and someone being put under because of sickness and with the potential for revival. But most urgent up front here is just the idea that the evening quickly does not serve as any kind of romantic backdrop. And now we have it. What he's about to do, if he's walking through a red light district, it's almost like the evening is being anesthetized so that it is not going to be a witness to what's going on. 25:06 Erin: Yeah. And then we have the half deserted streets. I guess they're half deserted because Prufrock is there and whoever else he's with. But after the patient, this section from the half deserted streets to insidious intent is also sort of deserted of people. Like we have all these images of emptiness, I guess. Streets are half deserted, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night cheap hotels. But there's no one enjoying the. Or rather not enjoying the restless night. And the restlessness here must be asexual. It must be a restlessness because of anxiety rather than because of the fact that it's being used for sex or one night stand or prostitution or whatever the case may be. Am I right thinking that that's the restlessness? 25:53 Wes: What we seem to learn as the poem goes on is that he's on a way to see a woman who may or may not have been courting, or maybe he's courting her and she doesn't know that. And he's either proposing marriage to her, he's making some sort of. Maybe he's proposing that they become girlfriend and boyfriend, something like that. He's got something that he has to say to her that he's anxious about saying. And yet here he is taking a detour through a red light district. And I take the restless nights in one night cheap hotels as people seeing prostitutes. So you're taking it as something else here. 26:27 Erin: Well, yeah, because the streets are like a tedious argument. The restlessness seems anxious to me also because I know that this is. I mean, this is a Boston poem, right? So there's something obviously essentially puritanical about. About the nature of this neighborhood. I don't think that Boston ever had a red light district. I mean, maybe I'm being naive here, but also the idea of the oyster shells, not the oysters. I mean that the typical aphrodisiac, but the actual aphrodisiac part taken out of it, the emptiness of that. I don't know what you want to say about that. The castration of that, as it were. The streets that are just like a tedious argument. Thinking about this poem, I was walking around Boston and those streets in my neighborhood that loop back around on each other so that you don't get anywhere. Yeah. It seems like what should be an area of indulgence, a red light district. Something like that is actually. It has all the sin or excitement or whatever leached out of it. And what you have left with is just the empty shell, literally, in this case of anxiety and not even doing anything, quote unquote, fun in any of these environments. And also the lack of people that leads me to think that. But I could see it going the other way too. 27:41 Wes: Yeah, we should stay maybe agnostic between both of those readings. And there's also a conflict in how we are supposed to conceive of him. One of the ideas I had is that this guy is middle aged and the way he's. His interactions with women have probably only been through seeing prostitutes. That's one possibility. Or he's virginal and he hasn't done that at all. And it's hard for me to say which. When I look at the tedious argument of insidious intent in the context of the rest of the poem, I wonder if he's thinking about reconciling his sexual history or sexuality in general with the more affectionate and higher feelings involved in love and a declaration of love to a woman. Something like that. It's not entirely clear. So that's one possibility for this. The tedious argument of insidious intent. He's worried about something. There's some sort of inner debate going on which is now represented by the streets themselves. And then the question is, why is the intent of the argument insidious? And it makes me wonder if it involves sexual intent. 28:54 Erin: Right. And what the question is is momentarily put aside. And then he actually goes to the party. Though I know some people think that he's never actually in the party, but I think he is, or you know, party used loosely, because then he's in the house and the women. 29:10 Wes: Yeah. So he's gonna be famously indecisive and hesitant and Hamlet esque. Even though we'll deny that comparison later on throughout the poem. But in the first stanza, right, he gets up. There's enough gumption to set things in motion, to start this walk and to go actually make the visit. So he's able to turn aside the tedious arguments and this more theoretical frame of mind. Right. So this do not ask, what is it? It almost Sounds like it's a very philosophical approach to the problem. Right. You become Aristotle and you say, what is this? There's a classic conflict there between being theoretical and being practical, actually moving to action. And ironically, of course, this whole poem is essentially an analysis and it's an addressing of the question, what is it? So then we get to this next. Shall I just read the next two lines? In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. This was another butt of ridicule. My friends in high school, I know 30:15 Erin: this is the Woody Allen movie part. 30:18 Wes: Yeah, I always. I always imagined him at this point peeking in the window at the women in the room. When I was in high school, I'm like, why is this guy peeking in the room? You know, if this were a movie, this would be a nice dramatic. You know, you cut to the destination and in a way, the antagonists in their environment. And that's where he's headed. So at this point, I still think of him as outside wandering around and then we just get a brief glimpse of where it is he's headed. 30:49 Erin: I think Michelangelo's a great. I mean, not only because women come and go and Michelangelo are just like a fantastic rhyme. And I like the fact that it's a refrain that recurs and it has a little kind of jazzy element to it. So it's very. Yeah, it's like a Woody Allen cocktail party. But also because Michelangelo himself is someone that I associate with violence, of course, but also just action. And he's a great figure. So he's someone who maybe makes Prufrock feel inadequate or something like that, but he's also a guy who's associated with. I don't know if virility is too strong of a word, but like, you know, violence and great action. And so they're talking about Michelangelo and Prufrock seems small maybe by comparison to that. 31:31 Wes: Yeah, I think it's important that Michelangelo is an artist. And because we can also read this as a. Ultimately, as we can always do the reading, where we think of this as a reflection on art and what it means to be an artist. The surface content here is that this is kind of a characteristic of high society or polite society, where people are engaged in probably a lot of small talk and meaningless chit chat. They're not doing anything deep or real, and yet they, you know, they sprinkle their conversation with these sorts of allusions because it's a mark of status and sophistication. So it's a way in which art is being made use of. Socially rather than engaged with at any substantive level. 32:20 Erin: The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes, licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, and seeing that it was a soft October night, curled once about the house and fell asleep. Yeah, this is the fog obsessed one. The fog is a cat. 32:47 Wes: Yeah. What we get now. So we get pollution, I guess the yellow fog is the result of burning coal or fuel or something, and the yellow smoke. And then of course, we get the falling on the back of this cat creature made of the fog. But the gist of the stanza is something kind of warm and cozy and nice. Right. This idea of a cat curling up around the house, you know, that's sort of evocative of a warm kind of homey place. 33:16 Erin: And I guess this gives credence to your reading that he's still looking through the windows because maybe he's delaying by waxing poetic about the standing water and the soot and everything. And rather than. Because I always read this as being. He's now immediately gone mentally outside the house, in the streets again as soon as he arrives. But I like the idea that he's looking in through the window and then kind of looks around him and as a way of delay, engages in this kind of imaginative exercise of seeing the bad effects of urbanization as some cozy little cat that he'd like to stay and pet rather than go inside the house. 33:51 Wes: Yeah, I mean, on my current reading of the poem, I didn't even think of, you know, that was when I was younger, I thought of him looking in the window, which is. It's still possible, Prufrock as Peeping Tom. But I thought of this as just him making a transition from a red light district to another part of town in which there's a nicer part of town in which his destination, the house, or really what we're seeing is it doesn't matter where Prufrock is exactly. He's imagining where it is he's going. So it's unclear, but I think. Yeah, that's a good point you make about kind of negative products of urbanization serving the purpose of this kind of more cozy image. And I don't know exactly what to make of that since there seems to be a bit of a class element of this. These upper class women doing upper class things and talking about Michelangelo, you Can think about the ways in which industry and the work of others is made to serve those purposes. And kind of kept out of sight. Right. So in these chambers, in these drawing rooms, the women are kind of sheltered from this. And it's the labor of others, in the end, serves the purpose of creating that shelter, of creating this cozy, protective cat. I think we can also make a connection between the fog and etherization. 35:11 Erin: Oh, sure. 35:12 Wes: And ultimately between that and some sort of dulling or obscuring effect of politeness and social forms. But correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought a lot about that in reading this poem. It seems as if. And this is where the fraudulence comes in again. That he's thinking about the essential hypocrisy of the way we engage with each other socially. And he's worried about whether love is that way as well. Whether love is inevitably a sort of fraudulence. Because it's actually predicated on something sinful, on lust. And just a kind of fogging over or papering over of its essentially sinful nature. That seems to be part of the conflict here. 35:55 Erin: That's interesting. 35:55 Wes: And then, more generally, society itself is right. The organizing force that builds society is something violent and exploitative. Societies come to be through a history of violence. They come together through warlords doing their thing. And whatever peace we enjoy within society with the cat kind of wrapped around us or historically, if we live at a more peaceful moment. It's easy to forget about that as the product of something more sinister that's evolved over time. And it's unclear how we could have ever gotten to where we are without that evolution. I bring that up just again, to highlight this conflict between the idea of what is social and peaceful and civilizationally advanced. And talk of Michelangelo and art with some sort of seedy underbelly. Or a conflict between that and some kind of energizing, contradictory force to which one might reduce it. 36:58 Erin: It's funny that you should say that, because I did a little word association in the notes in the margins. I wrote fog as cat fog settling around the house like brain fog. House is brain compartmentalized. And then fog of war. 37:10 Wes: Yeah. 37:11 Erin: So I think I got that fog 37:12 Wes: of war in my notes as well. 37:17 Erin: So it's funny that we both got to war somehow. 37:19 Wes: By the way, we should say that the musical Cats was based on Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. 37:25 Erin: Yeah. Should we? 37:27 Wes: Cats are a recurring theme, I think, in his poetry. They appear in a few different places. 37:36 Erin: Well, let's not throw that in his face, it's. 37:39 Wes: So if you love the. Go out and see the most recent movie production of Cats, because you'll love it. 37:51 Erin: I'll read the next. 37:52 Wes: Yeah, sure. 37:53 Erin: Okay. And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street Rubbing its back upon the window panes There will be time. There will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. There will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate Time for you and time for me and time. Yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea, you can almost hear the nervous finger tapping. I hear a finger tapping in this stanza. The recurring There will be time. There will be time. Aside from the obvious repetition of the word, time is thematic. 38:33 Wes: Yeah. So we get an evocation of Ecclesiastes here, Right. A time to be born and a time to die and so on. And probably also to seduction comes like poems, like Marvell's To His Coy Mistress, had we but world enough and time, that sort of thing. So I think, given the fact that this is a love song, we're meant to think of that. And it's an inversion of that. Right? Because a seduction poem would say, look, life is short and you're. We're getting old. Beauty fades. Let's get it on now, sooner than later, before that happens. In this case, the idea is that there's plenty of time for indecision and for hesitation, which we can take to be men, ironically. But what's also interesting here is that in a way, I think indecision does expand time in a way. What do you think of this whole time thing here? 39:30 Erin: I think he's playing with the idea of delay as creating meaning, like a false way of creating meaning. The idea of possibilities or endless possibilities seems to him to be something that it's good to hold on to, which is a false idea, Right? Because ultimately all he has is. It's sort of like he's bought time in bulk at Costco and now he has. Or he thinks that he has a lot of time and that that in itself conveys meaning, really. Time is just at the service of actually performing an action and finding meaningful ways to spend one's time. In other words, he's divorcing time from a way to spend that time. He's setting it aside. He's like putting it in a closet or something like that. And then maybe even sort of rubbing his hands in a way. I mean, not he's anxious, but saying, oh, you know, look at all this time I have, it's fine, it's all going to be fine. Of course there's a nervousness and an anxiety in that repetition. 40:34 Wes: It's interesting to say there will be time if we were to infer that he's middle aged from his bald spot later on, and to infer that he's sort of making a last ditch attempt at proposal, probably to someone who's much younger. Again, we get this kind of inverse of the seduction poem in which it's not her who's running out of time, and so get with me because of that, he's the one running out of time. But the way he understands that, it's as if he's reinterpreting a life of indecision as temporal expansiveness, right? Generally we think, I don't have time to do everything I want to do and so I better act quickly. But if you've been inhibited from action all your life, then in that domain of deliberation and tedious arguments of insidious intent, it's as if there's something that is expansive about that. In other words, you know, indecision eats time, right? But then it's as if because it eats time, it gives you all that time. In some sense, that's the ironic reversal. You know, you take something that seems to destroy our time as being the thing that actually gives it to us in the sense that we don't. It changes our standard of judgment where if we don't, if we're comfortable with indecision and hesitation, then we're not hurrying ourselves up in order to act because we leave action to the side. And then in that sense, by that standard evaluation, time looks more expansive. The other thing here, with the reference to Ecclesiastes, there's a kind of elision between saying there is a time for everything, right? A time to be born, a time to be die, everything in its place, and then this idea that there will be time. So the question is, it's the way in which the question of appropriateness degrades into the idea that I can always wait, there's always going to be time to make a decision because I want to make sure everything is happening at the appropriate time. But of course, if you try to make sure everything happens at the appropriate time, you end up with a bald spot. It ends up being late. 42:41 Erin: Related to that point, I recently read, not too recently, actually. A. E. Stallings's translation of works and days, her new translation, which is very good, I really recommend it. But it occurred to me that Hesiod is the one who, from what I remember, he comes up with the idea of the five ages of man. 42:57 Wes: Yep. 42:57 Erin: And so I looked up on Wikipedia, 42:59 Wes: so we should say we're talking about the Hesiod reference here. 43:03 Erin: Yeah. Time for all the works and days of hands. And of course, the whole poem is about the idea of toil and creating meaningful work. And there's an almanac in there, too. But in the little. Forgive me that I'm reading from Wikipedia, but in the little Wikipedia description of the five ages, the current time of at which Hesiod is writing is. Or Hesiod is the Iron Age. And so Wikipedia says Hesiod finds himself in the Iron Age. During this age, humans live in an existence of toil and misery. Children dishonor their parents, brother fights with brother, and the social contract between guest and host is forgotten. During this age, might makes right and bad men use lies to be thought good. At the height of this age, humans no longer feel shame or indignation at wrongdoing. Babies will be born with gray hair, and the gods will have completely forsaken humanity. There will be no help against evil. I read that and I was like, wow, you know, babies will be born with gray hair. 43:55 Wes: Yeah. 43:55 Erin: This is a Prufrock. Yeah, yeah. 43:58 Wes: Oh, yeah, that's a good. Interesting. Babies will be born with bald spots. Yeah. 44:02 Erin: Right, right. So it's funny, too, because it's. Hesiod thought that he was living in a, you know, a terrible time of his. You know, he himself was living past the Golden Age in a depleted time, a time after which all the meaningful time had been spent, or something like that. 44:19 Wes: Dang kids today. 44:20 Erin: Right? 44:22 Wes: Didn't he know he lived in ancient times? 44:25 Erin: I know. He should have appreciated it while he was there, while his village was getting pillaged or whatever. And so the idea that modernism is, of course, playing with as this sort of post, you know, everything is post everything and a sense of depletion or exhaustion of the arts and a sense in which everything good has already happened. And so, in a way, it's like there is a lot of time when you're just thinking that you're kind of playing with the leftovers of all the great ages past because all the great things have already happened. You know what I'm trying to say about that? 45:01 Wes: Yeah, yeah. 45:02 Erin: That's what I'm trying to get at. That's why I say that it's like Prufrock has all this time in bulk because he's like, all you have left is time. If you're in an age that's past the age of action and excitement and gold and profundity and all these things, it's like Marvell and his mistress have died, right? And the urgency is now gone. And you're just playing with those ages past that. Marvell was saying, you can't just linger by the Ganges and do whatever it is that you want to do. So now we're in that time, we're in the post time. 45:33 Wes: That's great. 45:34 Erin: It leeches the urgency. But of course, it's a form of. Of self deception, which compounds the deception that Prufrock tries to put on by preparing a face to meet the other faces. 45:44 Wes: Yeah, you have me thinking about how there will be time is actually his strange way of saying that there already has been so much time. And we can think of that in terms of Prufrock's life or in terms of history and in particular, what that means for a contemporary artist. We can read Eliot as thinking about the relation between tradition and the present, and we know that's something he thought a lot about. But I was also going to say about the works and days reference in Hesiod's poem, there's a lot of agricultural instruction and there's advice on how to live. So thinking of the reference to Polonius later on in the poem, where Prufrock says, I'm not a Hamlet, I'm just this more cautious and practically minded person, maybe to the point of being a fool. So there's the kind of Polonian element to works and days, and it's an attempt to kind of impart the virtues of work, hard work. It's kind of a homemaking instruction manual, if you think of animal husbandry. And agriculture is involved in that. But part of the reason why he's talking about the ages of man is he's talking about why it is that work is necessary. And so this story is evocative of the Fall in that way because it follows on Prometheus stealing fire and giving it to humanity, basically the capacity for technological and intellectual advancements. Because I think in the Golden Age, right, we supposedly lived free from all toil and illness. And then Pandora's box contains the curses, and one of them is that we will have to work, which is sort of our fate after leaving Eden, right, is to have to toil. The idea is that to be expelled from Eden and to live in a time of toil there's some connection there to living in a time of indecision rather than living in a time of heroism, something like that. 47:39 Erin: I agree with you. I think that's a good observation. I also think now this is even the time beyond the toil, because now we have too much. Right. Dropping a question on your plate led me to think of the question of appetite, which returns to that again and again. He's even then later on. I want to jump the gun here. But later on he's even overfed, and that kind of lulls him into not wanting to do anything. I looked up the term analysis paralysis, which I guess didn't even come into existence until the 70s, but he sort of presages that. Or the idea of choice overload is something I'm really interested in. So, like choice overload, they did all these studies that found that in supermarkets, for instance, if you put out, say, one product or two products, then people aren't going to be satisfied with not having much of a choice. But there's a point of diminishing returns where if you have too many choices, say, of toothpaste brands, then people are not going to know what to do and they're just going to walk away. They can't make the choice because they're presented with too many, and it just ends in indecision. And then they don't buy what they have to buy. So there's actually an ideal number of choices to have. But that occurs in all elements of one's life. It's very difficult to make a choice like this is what people talk about with why people aren't getting married because of Tinder, and the idea that there's always someone new out there, and it leads you to be so overwhelmed by the potential choices that you might make that you can't function at all. And if you do make a choice and you've had too many choices to select from, then it increases your dissatisfaction with that choice. And so I was thinking about all this stuff just because I'm kind of interested in that idea of choice overload, because it's something that happens to me all the time. If I go into a store and I think there are too many options, I will invariably walk out with nothing, even if I really need something. And then I kind of think later on, like, why did I do that? You know, so. And then I found out there's a reason for it. But that question of appetite, or of the idea that the toil has now produced so many options and so much excess, so much Fruit of that labor, that. That's, I think, part of Prufrock's problem or the modern problem, which is, you know, you can't choose anything because there are too many possibilities that other people's labor have opened up to us. 49:52 Wes: That's great. I like that. The after toil time. Is that what you said? 49:56 Erin: Yeah, after toil, post toil. We should really get our listeners to write down all the phrases that we've come up with. 50:03 Wes: Of course. 50:04 Erin: This is a sad list. 50:05 Wes: Yeah, that's really great. And again, it comes back to this idea that what weighs upon us is the accrual of time in the past and history and kind of an accumulation of history. And that goes for the arts. That goes for Everything has been done. What do I do now? Or can I do anything that is original, that isn't the mere product that hasn't been done before, or isn't just a product of influence that isn't entirely derivative? So there's the indecision predicated on that burden, and then there's the kind of related in a decision that you've talked about, where at some point so much work has been done, that life, it creates so many options and making choices becomes so much more complicated. So I like this when he says there will be a time to murder and create, that sounds very heroic and very. Yes, there's potentially at least a person of action. And it sounds to me again, like an inversion of the Ecclesiastes. And a time to be born and at a time to die. Born becomes create. Die becomes murder. But of course, in the end, we end up anticlimactically with taking toast and tea. Right. There's plenty of time to do all of this before the taking of toast and tea. Unfortunately, he's in the era of taking toast and tea. That's his age, not the era of murdering and creating necessarily. 51:34 Erin: It's a tribute to Eliot's genius, then, that this poem was even created, that he was even able to make the choices to lead to his allusions because of also the selection of having so many artists to choose from that he might allude to in the poem, like the wasteland is a monument to the triumph over choice overload. I guess that's a good point. 51:54 Wes: You know, if you have enough footnotes, then maybe you can overcome the accumulation of history and time. 52:01 Erin: Right, Right. Well. And so then we go from toast and tea to the return of the refrain. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo, which is great because it recalls him to the present. But also to an artistic allusion, which contrasts with the toast and tea and like you say, the heroic age. 52:18 Wes: It's what's talked about during toast and tea, right? 52:21 Erin: Right. 52:22 Wes: It's no longer what's done, but it's history. And it's become an. An object of discussion and a kind of vehicle for social interaction in the present. So it's suggestive of part of what leads to indecision and hesitation. In a way, social life itself becomes a form of inaction or stasis. It just kind of lives off of the past or off of. In current times, off of the media environment. And it becomes easy to do that rather than to do anything to create or murder whatever you want to do, whatever your thing is, you talk about it or communicate your signal, your status through it. 53:02 Erin: So the next stands up and indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare and do I dare time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair? They will say how his hair is growing thin, My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin. They will say, but how his arms and legs are thin. Do I dare disturb the universe in a minute? There is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. 53:33 Wes: So we find out he's middle aged. Doesn't have to be middle aged. I mean, I wonder what Eliot was thinking of himself writing this in his early 20s. Right. Did he feel old already? Was he explicitly thinking about what it might mean to be middle aged? I mean, he might have thought he was thinking about someone in his 30s. Right. You could be balding in your 30s. It's the safest bet to assume it's middle aged. And then in the end of the poem, of course, he's worried about getting old alone. The thinness of the hair. 54:00 Erin: Yeah, I like the fact that we have thin rhyming with thin. In this stanza and prior stanzas, you have time rhyming with time. I think those are the two big perfect rhymes, perfect repetitions, thin and time. 54:14 Wes: There's a lot more rhyming in this than it. Like, I hadn't reflected on the amount of rhyming, you know what I mean? Like, I thought of this as very free. I mean, it is free. 54:22 Erin: It is. And when the rhymes do occur, I mean, I think the closeness of the rhymes expands and contracts when it does rhyme, which is nice because it's like time, I think, expanding and contracting. And when the rhymes are close together, there's a Nice little bow. Or maybe we could say a pin in the rhythm. But also a kind of like a nervous energy, I think, that's getting released maybe. I mean, that's always the case with rhyme anyway. 54:48 Wes: So there's almost something, I think that. About the earlier part of the stanza that seems frenetic and rushed, you know, do I dare and do I dare time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair. Very Dr. Seussy there. And then you get tripped up. Then the hesitation comes in, the hesitant feel comes in with do I dare? So very short line. And then disturb the universe. In a minute there is time. And then we get a full line again at the end with a nice rhyme. 55:19 Erin: Yeah, the speculation as he takes more time thinking what they might be saying and then self reflecting and then catches himself with the rhyme at the end. I think you're right. I didn't realize how that in the earlier part of the stanza, it's almost like he's winding himself up, even just the way that it begins, you know, and indeed there will be time, like da da, da, da, da, da da. You know, you kind of gain momentum and then it peters out and then he remembers himself at the end of the stanza. 55:46 Wes: It gives you a good sense of what seems to be his feeling that what he has to do is. It kind of has cosmic dimensions to it. Do I disturb the universe? You can see that the stakes are very high for him. And so, yes, if the proposal or whatever it is to this woman is of such monumental significance, then you can start to understand the hesitation and the indecision and understand that perhaps this is something that has afflicted him for a very long time. If his hair is growing thin now, and I think again of this conflict between a more mature way of relating to people or something we associate with civilization, a possible marriage and certain institutions. But above all, the idea of loving someone. So that's the universe that might be disturbed. And the thing that might disturb it is the underlying baseness of the instinct that seems to be tangled up with the proposal. Right. It's a proposal for marriage, perhaps predicated on love. We could speculate that the hesitation comes from his worry that it's too tangled up with something that he's ashamed of, which is the sexual or the instinctual component. So I'm sorry to get so psychoanalytic 57:08 Erin: about it, but no, that's good. I mean, I think there's also a selfish quality that he is the center of the universe, or he Himself is the universe, too. The bald spot in the middle of my hair, you know, later we'll see the head of John the Baptist, and I think of him as sort of like a basketball head. Like, you know, that when he. When he's. His necktie is asserted by a simple pin. And later he'll say that he's sprawling on a pin. I think of it as like a basketball spinning on a finger, you know, and that he is the globe in a way. I mean, this whole thing is. I mean, to be honest, this is where I start to get really annoyed with Prufrock, because his part of this anxiety has to come from a kind of self obsession that you think that everyone is talking about you. Really. No one cares about you, no one's talking about you. But that anxiety, I think, springs from that kind of self obsession and the idea that you are the universe or that the action that he's going to take will disturb the universe. It has to come from a place of, you know, the kind of selfishness that bachelor is prone to. 58:14 Wes: Do I disturb the universe? What's he disturbing? Well, he's stirring up a little hornet's nest of women. And how are they going to sting him? Well, they're going to say his hair is growing thin or his arms and legs are thin. Right. 58:29 Erin: Which sounds true. 58:30 Wes: Right. But these very not pleasant to hear comments, of course, would he ever really actually hear them directly? He's just speculating that that's what they're saying about him behind his back. But what he's anxious about disturbing is the cognition of others or their. You know, he's worried about what other people think of him. And to disturb the universe is to stir up the thoughts of others, let's just put it that way. There's an element of self obsession in that. There's an element of paranoia, even. I mean, it's something we're all familiar with. Right. It's also so human to be concerned with what other people think of us. And part of the anxiety of socializing is just the sense in which we are exposing ourselves, so to speak, to people. But in particular, it's this fear on his part of being pegged. Right. So in one sense, it's just about being called old. But I think, as we will find out as we go on, the idea of him later on wriggling on a pin is just that we're all characters. And that's to say we all have these really strong character traits, personality traits in us that are fashioned by our upbringing and by everything that has happened to us. So there's a sort of residue of everything we've been through, including especially anything traumatic that shows up in our personality. And it's something that's hard to buck, right? It's really hard to change our habits because of that. There's a strong amount of tendency just to repetition. And that's another sense in which there's. There's time, right? There's plenty of time in the sense that there's plenty of repetition that goes on because of these traits we have. Think about what we do when we gossip or when we. People watch or something like that. We sort of reduce people to their personalities and to something almost mechanical, right? So. And so does. Oh, they did that because they're just that type of person. They're such a nervous person. And so they always do that nervous thing. So you have your particular behaviors, which to you are a matter of indecision or decision or reflection, sort of these subjective inner experience. There's an objectifying element in what goes on. And the way other people view that sort of thing, the objectification happens in the sense that they reduce you to. To causal influences and mechanisms. So it's not like to you, the anxiety of should I marry this person or not? Blah, blah, blah. And someone might just say, oh, that's just Prufrock being Prufrock. So he's being reduced, he's being objectified. And I think part of our anxiety about others, our fear of what they might think of us, is not just that those thoughts might be negative, but that they're reductive and that there's kind of a magical quality to them. Right. That those thoughts can deprive us of our autonomy and our objectivity by pegging us, by pigeonholing us into some sort of character or some sort of this or that. I don't know. Does any of that make any sense? 1:01:38 Erin: Sure. 1:01:38 Wes: I think I wanted to just to mention all that now, because I think it becomes. This idea gets returned to later on in the poem, clothing itself, just to talk about his clothing. These are sort of trappings, right? And they represent the kind of social trappings which also trap. Right. Trap us into various sorts of behaviors and determine us. So this. This also gets us back to the confinement and potential hypocrisy or fraudulence of social interaction and speaks to the larger possible problem of whether and possible source of Prufrock's indecision, which is a worry about whether love itself is inevitably fraudulent. So he's being the good guy, right? That's the preemptive absolution for this fraud, is that I'm just being a good guy. But being a good guy in a way means being a liar if it means being in denial of the sexual component or the aggressive component or whatever. 1:02:35 Erin: Huh. I like that. So I think this is a good place to end part one. Join us next time for part two of our discussion. Thanks, Wes. 1:02:42 Wes: Thanks, Erin. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find [email protected] [email protected] Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter joysubtext. And once again, thank you for listening.