#and the ambiguity of the gender is specifically indicated which is very Tiresias.’ | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

softly-and-suddenly · 1 year ago

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When I found out that in his Waste Land endnotes T.S. Eliot said that the stanza “Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you / Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded / I do not know whether a man or a woman / —But who is that on the other side of you?” was inspired by Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition when the explorers fell under the delusion that there was always one more person there with them than there actually was, my brain shattered into a million pieces and I never recovered.

#This is way to niche to be posting on Tumblr about but genuinely what the fuck #I’ve read the waste land so many times and the first time I read it I thought that this was clearly an allusion to #the two disciples on their way to Emmaus when they run into a third person they can’t recognize even though it’s Christ #And then the next few times I read it I though ‘oh okay this is obviously Tiresias since he has walked among the lowest of the dead #and the ambiguity of the gender is specifically indicated which is very Tiresias.’#And then I read the end notes! And it’s about a real honest to god phenomenon that dying people at the end of their tethers experience!!!#And it’s actually all three and it’s also death walking among them and a million other things. I want to kiss TS Eliot with tongue #the waste land

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