This is a slight cheat on my statement that in the canonical sliver of this enterprise, I am reading books that I ought to have read but have been too lazy to take on. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Other Poems did cross my way when I was at school. I wasn't ready for it, come to think of it probably still am not. No matter, this is dynamite stuff. Elusive, allusive, beguiling. Two extracts stand out for me. First from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, comes one of those passages I wish I could pass-off as my own:
In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.
More striking still is this that served as the inspiration for the title of Waugh's brilliant novel, A Handful of Dust:
And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
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