The Connection of Mortality with One’s Love of Life in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Yulisa Amadu Maddy's No Past No Present No Future

The Connection of Mortality with One’s Love of Life in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Yulisa Amadu Maddy's No Past No Present No Future

Through many writers’ works the correlation of mortality and love of life is strongly enforced. This connection is one that is easy to illustrate and easy to grasp because it is experienced by humans daily. For instance, when a loved one passes away, even though there is time for mourning, there is also an immediate appreciation for one’s life merely because they are living. In turn, the correspondence of mortality and a stronger love for life is also evident in every day life when things get hard and then one is confronted by some one else whom has an even bigger problem, then making the original problem seem minute. This is seen as making the bad look worse so then the bad looks good and the good looks even better. The connection of mortality and one’s love for life is seen in both T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Yulisa Amadu Maddy’s No Past No Present No Future.

Eliot’s words "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" imitate much of his attitude during the poem The Waste Land. This quote can be interpreted in different ways. One way is that the dust Eliot mentions is a symbol for humans starting as dust and returning to dust in death. Therefore, the quote would be expressing the feeling of fearing death. By exemplifying this fear, Eliot then enables his audience to take it further to appreciating life because the only other choice is death.

In Eliot’s The Wasteland, It seems as if the more his world is falling apart, the more he wants to break it down and find what really matters or what he really needs to continue living and to truly appreciate life. As he examines his surroundings, he realizes so much of it is in ruins, and that alone makes him feel as though his own life is slipping away, as if he does not even control his own fate. Eliot also realizes how upside down and backward his world is now functioning. Everything that was once right is now wrong, and everything that once seemed moral is not moral any more. Once this is brought to his attention, Eliot decides the only way to overcome this is to do away with the bad and keep only the good, then reforming the old into a new overall positive and secure place of true life.