Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
When I thought about fragmentation and the infertile land that Eliot describes in The Waste Land, a certain image came to mind: a dry land with fragmented sheets of dirt. The lack of water is so extreme that not only is the land infertile but it is fragmented. Similarly, not only was 20th-century European society spiritually and intellectually dead but it was parched to the extent that communication was broken.
1 comment:
I think this is a really cool image, Jun. I really like the idea of the fragmented pieces of dirt conveying the lack of communication. I also think that the fragmentation can apply to one's sense of self. In The Waste Land, we see many characters not being able to fully understand or commit to what they themselves want. Many of them also appear to lose themselves, in a way, in the world that has become dry and infertile.
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