Originally written December 2022.

April is the cruelest month. —T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

Anyone who would pick up an anthology of english poetry would likely find T.S. Eliot within its pages. Specifically, one would find his remarkable poem, The Waste Land.* Published in 1922, it is often dubbed as the benchmark modernist poem of the century. By Eliot’s design, The Waste Land takes images from western literary history to depict, in a highly fragmented manner, the myth of the 20th century man: shattered, isolated, and deprived of meaning in a world desolate of virtues. Written during Eliot’s troubled marriage and published right after the Great War, the poem once again rises to relevance in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images …
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

My first daughter was born a couple of months before the pandemic hit U.S. shores. It was a politically intriguing time … but none of it mattered to me. She was the center of my universe, the apple of my eye. However, the time of elation was quickly disrupted. In a matter of weeks, I received orders to support the mission in New York City to turn the Javits Center to a field hospital. Not one in my chain of command knew what was happening, nor did anyone see an end in sight.

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

It was surreal seeing the streets of New York City empty and void. It was unreal. The Army lodged us in hotels, and I tried not to go out much. I lived on canned tunas and bread, saving as much money as I could. I was just glad I had a job at that time—I knew everyone was not as lucky. After a few weeks, most of the beds in Javits remained empty, so some of us were transferred to the surrounding areas to support the rest of the units who responded to this mission. Two months after, the mission was picked up by another unit, with most beds remaining empty until we boarded our busses headed back to North Carolina.

April 2020—April indeed felt as the cruelest month. Not only did the pandemic destroyed lives, it initiated a polarization within the country that has not been felt in years. Jobs impacted. Doubt and anxiety was widespread. Political division has widened. Families were isolated. And most pointlessly floated in quarantine, week after week. Most had felt, to some degrees, the desolation of the 20th century man: shattered, isolated, deprived of meaning in the face of death. Ninety-eight years after it was written, The Waste Land had become eerily prophetic.

What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

The metaphysical fragmentation in the Waste Land found a hazy mirror image in the physical wake of Covid-19, be it the frustrating phenomena of the uncertain, the despair of meaninglessness, or the emptiness of carnal encounter. The pandemic exposed our society’s lack of resilience, and it stems from the individual soul’s inability to understand the present through the transcendent. Every policy had to be about the ‘safety’ of the self, which had to be preserved at all costs—and it did cost. Carl Trueman writes:

We have been faced with an enemy which cannot be immediately defeated and which brings the reality of mortality closer to us than has been typical of our age, marked as it is by the practical denial of death. Our panicked response has entailed eliminating the consideration of any social good except the immediate preservation of life, whatever the cost to others, and a corresponding desperate hunt for a vaccine. The inability of our moral imaginations to rank goods, let alone view the pandemic from any transcendent point of reference, has been dramatically exposed.** —Carl R. Trueman, The Apocalypse of the Modern Self, published in Humanum Review.

Above all, there is the absence of order and and of a holy God in the poem. I think these lines in particular reach close to the pinnacle issue:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)

These lines are of course allusions to the Arthurian myth of the Fisher King. Among other things, they beg to be understood from a philosophical standpoint. For one to ask shall I at least set my lands in order is to send a question that goes beyond the landscape. It is outward facing, and internal looking. It is an affront to the present chaos, permeating even its inhabitants’ mind and soul. It is a question for the Waste Land—our Waste Land.

A healthy society, despite its challenges, functions based on citizens with well-founded values. That is external order. It is founded upon citizens who function, at the very base of any true virtue, on freedom from the disruption of guilt and sin. That is internal order. Absolute truths are necessary for these orders to be true, or any virtue will collapse as a matter of personal preference. In many ways, both of these orders had been shaken by the pandemic, and as our governing and cultural institutions inch absolute truth out the picture, any chances of restoring health to our society are rapidly being destroyed. A.W. Tozer writes,

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. The history of mankind will probably show that no people has ever risen above its religion, and man’s spiritual history will positively demonstrate that no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God…” —A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (1961)

Without any idea of God, there can be no chance to define absolute truth—the very foundation of any lasting civilization. Real, biblical christianity relies on God for that matter. It does not define morality in a post-modern manner, where truths can be anything at the whim of one’s fancies. Biblical christianity is absolute, objective, and logical. It is consistent in its virtues, in its definition of justice, and in its atonement of sins. Consequently, it is the only hope of restoration in a post-covid world as it reaches one person at a time.

For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns—broken cisterns that cannot hold water. —Jeremiah 2:13 (c. 626 BC)

In this shattered, isolated, and desolate wasteland, christianity —or rather, Christ himself—is the well who is able to water and fill the arid plains with life. By replacing the search for self-fulfilment, Christ redeems men from meaninglessness, and restores order from within. It is no coincidence Eliot converted to christianity later on in his life. To use an Arthurian symbol, christianity is the only possible Holy Grail that will restore this wasteland (and for us christians, we know it is more than that). Twenty-one years after his landmark poem, Eliot writes:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

—T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (1943)

*The Waste Land was published in December of 1922. I am writing this during the poem’s centenary and two years after the mentioned events. As a lifelong reader of The Waste Land (and of T.S. Eliot), I think this in fact serves as one among my many tributes to this unique and unrepeatable work of literature.

**Carl R. Trueman presents a sharp analysis of how the the self is defined in our present times in his article The Apocalypse of the Modern Self found in Humanum Review.

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December 5, 2022

HANSEL ONG

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The Waste Land: A Covid-19 Retrospective and the Search for God