Sunset. The rainy season, Bangkok, walking through the crowds of masked commuters. A rope is lifted, and a certain number are let through the electronic gates and onto the subway platform. As we board, the announcement is polite and almost cooing in Thai, stilted in English “Please refrain from talking.”
It's a line that has haunted me since I first read it, and I had to look it up again.
“Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about.”
I was around 12 or 13 when I first read that, an early winter twilight falling over the prairie states, around the time I truly internalized how tawdry and depressing the world around me could be. T.S. Eliot wrote those lines from East Coker in 1939, fully aware of the much greater darkness the world was settling into once again.
I didn't know that then. I knew it from context. Paul Theroux was quoting it in a bit from The Old Patagonian Express, using it to describe the New York subway of the pre-Giuliani days – and even that, I only knew from transmitted experience, from reruns of The Equalizer and from cable viewings of the Death Wish movies, that showed New York as an ongoing turf war between gangs which somehow admitted both black-nationalist kids in leather jackets and sunglasses and white punks with pink mohawks.
I didn't know anything about T.S. Eliot's life, and nothing of his poetry other than bits of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land that I'd found in my parents' books. I didn't know that he'd written East Coker to expound upon his belief that science and material progress and art had failed to make people happier in any fundamental way. He was the scion of industrial wealth, his family owning a Saint Louis firm with the gloriously Victorian-positivist name of the “Hydraulic-Press Brick Company,” affiliated with the sunny, inclusive, progress-affirming Unitarian Church. And none of that really seemed to matter after 1,000,000 men got vaporized at the Somme. I didn't know about his stuttering attempts to turn himself into an English country gentleman, I didn't know about his bomb-dropping effect on literature in the English language, his fully-formed modernism signaling the rise of a new literary idiom.
I did know, though, that it resonated. Hard.
And it's a line that I think about in my darker moments, when the things that sustain me – whether that's art, travel, experience, hedonistic abandon – fail to suffice. When I am forced to confront my own atomization.
And I reflect on this line in particular because it seems so absolutely of the moment – the faces on the train, the growing terror of nothing to think about, the fear of not being entertained. All the new Netflix series look like garbage. You're scrolling through your phone when you're taking a shit.
It's an easy out to look back to a time -- around Eliot's own time -- when people often presume things were simpler, less alienated. But Eliot was looking back much further, to a time before the Industrial Revolution, when all reasoning was analogy, every moment was imbued with symbolism, and the notion of physical laws separate from the watchful eye of God verged on the inconceivable. To the time of the Medieval passion play and the charivari and the tales of the fisher king, when the sun rose and set through divine will.
It was a path already trodden by people like Henry Adams and D.H. Lawrence. Like H.P. Lovecraft, like Aldous Huxley, like Ezra Pound he saw the malaise of the present, mass destruction and new forms of totalitarianism, but lacked the confidence to move forward into the future, and instead fetishized the mythic past.
Lovecraft died, forgotten, a miserable incel avant la lettre a little before East Coker was published. Huxley quickly became a weird sort of proto-hippie, writing dull panegyrics to Hinduism and LSD. Pound disappeared down the rabbit hole of Mussolini worship and mental illness.
I read the full text of East Coker several years later as a college student, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Eliot's portent-laden avant-garde babblings suited the worldview.
But rereading the thing, I don't know how I missed the point. Eliot, having spent the interwar years saying fuck it all, seeing the rising tide of fascism, finally realized the world he lived in was worth fighting for, and he closes the text with uncharacteristic hope – I got the uncertainty of it, the dissociation, the clutching at straws. But then I read the last line as the train left the Sirikit Center station.
“We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deep communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. The end is my beginning.”
A flower in a bomb crater, as it were.
I emerge from the subway at Asok, the electronic billboards leering, rain spitting. I shut my eyes, and I can almost hear the crash of waves all around me.
