Extract

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

A middle-aged man walks through half-deserted streets toward a party where he will say nothing that matters and ask nothing that frightens him, and in doing so enacts the quiet catastrophe Eliot believed was the defining condition of modern life: consciousness so refined it has dissolved the will to live fully. The poem moves like thought itself, sliding from fog to mermaids to the smell of coffee, circling a question it never names because naming it would require the courage Prufrock has spent his life refining out of himself. Eliot was twenty-two when he wrote it, and its publication in 1915 broke English poetry open in ways that have never been repaired. Every hesitation you have dressed up as taste, every silence mistaken for sophistication, is here, measured out in coffee spoons.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​