I'm enormously grateful today that a scholar named Matthew Hollis has written a very long, outrageously comprehensive, book on T. S. Eliot's composition (with Ezra Pound's help) of his groundbreaking modernist poem "The Wasteland." It's a huge heavy hardback with an arresting dust jacket I look forward to chopping up for one of my paper-&-glue collages (yes, I shamelessly admit I do that sort of thing). It even has a built-in bookmark—a snazzy red ribbon attached to the binding, which my cats are trying their best to destroy. If I can fight them off and keep the ribbon intact, I'll also paste it in my celebratory collage.
I didn't know when I ordered this book that it was going to be an over-the-top wondrous Christmas present to myself, but OMG... after reading the first 50 pages yesterday after it arrived, I see that it truly is. While "The Wasteland" is not my Numero Uno favorite of Eliot's poems (that would be "East Coker"), it's been a big part of my intellectual life since the early 1970s. I am OOT thrilled to dive into learning an unnecessary abundance of details about it.
I have a friend who majored in chemistry at MIT during a time when that university was extremely misogynistic (for all I know, it still is). She says the way she survived those four years was to recite "The Wasteland" every day under her breath as she walked across campus. I can identify with that. It's more than a poem: it's like a surrealist manifesto, a collection of imagery and ideas that can buttress one's will against a sea of troubles.
Now, to be able to read a 400-page line-by-line exegesis of this poem, complete with full psychological, social, historical, lit-critical, and biographical context, plus 150 pages of footnotes and bibliography, is more than a mere book for me. This is an event. It's a gift from the gods. (Yes, I'm weird—but no weirder than any other nerd deeply into some pop-cultural phenom. I mean, think of all the folks who can speak Klingon, High Valyrian, Na'vi...)
So... Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night! I hope tonight will be for you a very dark and bleak longest night of the year, followed by rejoicing at the return of the Sun, as the days start getting longer again. Or, as pagans like me say, Have a Cool Yule! My husband and I and a few pagan friends will be doing what we do every year: keeping a Yule log burning in the fireplace as we hold a vigil all night long, telling and reading stories aloud to stay awake. Then we'll go outside at dawn to wave at the rising sun and do silly stuff like singing the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun."
There are multiple ways of saying Happy Winter Solstice in Gaelic. For example,
Grianstad a' Gheimridh Sásta. I find Gaelic utterly unpronounceable, even with aids, so I usually just blur it into some bastardized American version of Happy Midwinter, like "Happy Moongeeree."
