# other observations and prufrock *The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 01 Mar 1999* > Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright > in each message remains with the person who wrote it. > Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original > archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than > retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. --- ### Peter Stephenson *01 Mar 1999, 15:05* I would tend to caution against seeing Prufrock as anyone too specific --- he may well be a horny old man, but Eliot is saying `there's a lot of it about'. To me he stands for all (or much of) the impotence and apathy of the modern world, just as, for example, the `small house agent's clerk' in the Wasteland (`one of the poor on whom assurance sits Like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire', not guaranteed to be an exact quotation) stands for its degeneration and pettiness. For that reason, I don't think there are many general structural resonances between Prufrock and Wolfe, even Peace, since Wolfe's major characters often have wide-reaching, if subtle, effects on the universes of the novels --- Weer certainly does, however negative they may seem in retrospect; if Weer's tale is of being part of other people's stories (which is a very nice idea), then to a lot of them he's been a golem in the gears, which Prufrock was never capable of being. But I'm agog to hear any specific thoughts. till human voices wake us, corncrake ``` Peter Stephenson Tel: +39 050 844536 WWW: http://www.ifh.de/~pws/ Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy ``` ---