The Universe

In high school we read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and I have always loved it.  I hadn't thought about it really in years though, until yesterday when I was eating a taco in my friend Alison's apartment as she packed up to embark on a three-month foreign travel adventure. 

I don't even remember why I mentioned T.S. Eliot, but she said, "I have 'The Waste Land,'" and promptly handed me her copy, which was actually her dad's copy, handily annotated with translations of Eliot's favorite obscure non-English passages, with which he enjoyed frustrating the reader by inserting them as preludes or sometimes just into the text of his poems. 

Anyway, so I am finally, over a decade after passing AP English with flying colors, in possession of my very own copy of "The Waste Land."  To celebrate, here is what has always been my favorite passage from Prufrock:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--
(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!')
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--
(They will say"'But how his arms and legs are thin!')
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. 

Do I dare disturb the universe?
Sure, why not?