Waste land?

This morning - when actually I should have spent more time out of doors, as the sun was shining intermittently and it was mild and pleasant - I was looking through the poetry book in the photo, having got it off the shelf for a specific reference the other day. I bought it because it was on my class reading list for Ordinary and Higher Ordinary English Literature at Glasgow University, and it cost 8/6d. It actually falls open at the page in the second photo, where T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is sparsely annotated with suspiciously neat biro notes, and I realise now, reading these notes, that I hadn't a clue why I was making them and really didn't have a clue what this impenetrable poem was about. Reading it again this morning, I was struck by how magnificent some of the lines are, by how I remember some of them with quotable clarity - the opening two lines, the top of the second page (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) ... - and how I still don't have a clue what it's about. I should have read the book Eliot brought out to explain it. Maybe I shall - I see I can buy a used copy online for £3.49. But what a waste! Why did we study poems and still not get them? Why was my first exam in practical criticism of a poem - for we didn't do such things in school in these days - such a terrifying experience? And why, oh why, were we so badly taught? 

I wonder if it's better now.

Half a century later, I wasted my morning indoors (except for doing some yoga exercises for my stiff back) and dragged us both out into the rain in the latter half of the afternoon. (Said rain had been completely torrential earlier, so that even I was not tempted). We walked up the Glen Massan road, sheltered by trees for much of its length, and saw not a soul except for a hapless man in an incongruously white and long Audi driving slowly up the hill and taking several goes at turning in a passing place and heading back down again. The rain more or less stopped, and as we moved away from the rushing water in the gorge it seemed utterly silent. We saw two red squirrels, one slender and very red, the other heavier with a strangely grey tail, and several sheep, some of whom stopped chewing to stand and stare at us, while others, in a lower field, ran off en masse as we approached. 

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

I thought as I came upstairs that I'd be too tired to write this, but it's a strangely soothing ritual before bed. Night night!