"Before the taking of a toast and tea"
There are moments when I take notice of two kinds of time occurring simultaneously — a peripheral sense of anticipation for the next action to happen, alongside an overlay of timelessness existing only in split seconds. This recognition occurs randomly during a day; blankly staring out a window, watching birds fly from the feeder to trees going back and forth in the wind, floating in the ocean on a blue sky afternoon, eyes at the horizon line, not particularly in search of anything.
In T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Eliot visually conjures a scene where time is inescapable and limitless. His words mirror the intangibility of my awareness most specifically in line 34: “Before the taking of a toast and tea”. Throughout the entire stanza Prufrock emphasizes both to himself and the reader, the dissolution of the struggle at the intersection of time and timelessness. Defining transcendence.