"If I came across a historical allusion, I ignored it."

Mr. Lannon, cover your ears...er..eyes.
I may "get in trouble" for what I'm about to say, but I'm saying it anyway.

As I have matured through the scholastic process, teachers have started urging me to not just read a passage, novel, or play, but to read it while engaging in critical thinking. Teachers and professors encourage me to highlight, underline, annotate, take notes, compare what I'm reading to other works, my own works, or my own life. I am told to make reading an interactive, engaging process. Countless times I have been told by scholastic mentors "don't just read it, really focus on what the piece is saying, think critically, and really study the piece." I think that the process of critical analysis is great, I really do. Making annotations is fun to me! But sometimes you just want to tread for the sake of reading. This is what I did through most of "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot. I knew the piece was notorious for being difficult and hard to comprehend, and so I chose to regress down a couple levels in my thinking and I went back to the basics of reading. I took one word at a time. And I was rewarded with a genuine love and appreciation of "The Wasteland."

What's not to love? It's fantastic; it's beautiful. The first few lines caught me with their intense imagery and metaphorical content. "April is the cruelest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain." By turning off my "Critical thinking" portion of my brain for just a little while, I was able to focus on the form of the piece, on each individual word or phrase rather than the overall message or theme. (Ok so maybe the critical thinking desire came back everyonce inawhile...I couldn't help but notice that his opening stanza ended each line with an ING verb...once a critical reader always a critical reader). I felt guilty while reading the poem, and if I were cheating or taking the easy way out. I felt like a young reader again, when I was in second grade and I read any books my parents or grandparents left lying around the house. When I was that young I didn't always understand what I was reading, I simply read for the pure enjoyment of the action of reading itself. I refused to read the foot-notes my first time through, I just languidly breezed though it, stopping only to translate the occasional German, French, Italian, or Sanskrit phrase. If I came across a historical allusion, I ignored it. I focused only on Eliot's word choice, syntax, and "pretty words." I read one section at a time, not even bothering to find connecting themes between them. My high school A.P. English teacher would be so ashamed.

Maybe it was cheating, I'm not sure, but it sure did help me get through the darn thing the first few times. And who knows, maybe it helped me to actually enjoy Eliot, rather than resent him as several of my peers seem to do.

Favorite parts that stick out to me were "Part II. A Game Of Chess." the imagery here is thick and rich and conveys a decadent yet mysterious image that eventually leads into the two women's conversation at what I think is a bar. Also, I really enjoyed the Biblical allusions in "What The Thunder Said." I did not catch the correlation in the first stanza to Christ until I read "The Significance of The Modern Wasteland." When I then re-read the poem I found this stanza really jumping out at me. Eliot says that because of Salvation, "We who were living are now dying/With a little patience." I love that line. The way it details a portion of the human experience really made sense to me. People can get fed up with living. Things get hard, or monotonous, but we keep waking up, with patience, because many of us feel as if we have a reason to. And so patiently, we continue. The following stanzas felt rushed and harried to me, I read through them quickly and almost breathlessly. I know this is no coincidence. Eliot's words became urgent and pleading and he repeats "If there were water...if there were only water...If there were water." The proceeding lines, 359 to 376 were also favorites of mine.

I believe that to read modern works effectively, one needs to approach the task with an engaging mind, make the process an interactive one, and search for correlations, themes, and submerged messages. In reading "The Wasteland" however, I chose to return to the basics of reading and read for pleasure only, remarking in awe Eliot's intricate writing style and vivid imagery and metaphors. I still have a long way to go with this piece, there is a lot about it I need to learn. But for my first initial readings this past weekend, I chose to ignore such pressures and i took it one word at a time. As a result, I enjoyed every word. Upon taking modern literature classes in high school, I developed a little crush on modernist works. Eliot has helped to solidify my interest and appeal to modernism. I find it a little ironic that my appreciation of modernism was furthered through a poem of which I understood little, but enjoyed none the less. To quote Eliot himself, "It's so elegant/So intelligent."