From Old to Young: Rejuvenation in The Waste Land

As life expectancy increases, senescence is also prolonged. Older adults might hope to live long or even think of asking God for eternal life, as has been portrayed in scenes in popular culture.

There is a well-known mythological example of a woman who was granted eternal life. Years ago, I saw the portrait of the Cumaean Sibyl on the Sistine Chapel ceiling drawn by Michelangelo (Fig. 1). She was capable of foretelling the future. She had been granted immortality by Apollo, but forgot to ask for perpetual youth. Thereafter, she shrank into withered old age, and her authority declined.

Fig. 1.

Cumaean Sibyl by Michelangelo (1475–1564) on the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome, Vatican. From public domain through https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27Cumaean_Sibyl_Sistine_Chapel_ceiling%27_by_Michelangelo_JBU35.jpg#filelinks. This image by Jörg Bittner Unna is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

“The Waste Land” (1922), written by Thomas Sterns Eliot, starts with the inscription, “I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘What do you want?’ She answered, ‘I want to die.’”¹ Eliot wrote this poem about the crisis of modern culture and the breakup of civilization just after World War I (1914–1918).²

The shortest of the five sections (IV. Death by Water, only 10 verses, of the total 433 verses) rebuts ideas of renewal and regeneration.

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and loss.

           A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

           Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Literary critics say that this section represents samsara: the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Water symbolizes baptism, rebirth, relief, and regeneration. When Phlebas drowns, he seems to forget all his worries and cares from his mortal life. Sins are washed away in the moment of death, and the soul is clean and pure. This theme is related to regeneration and rejuvenation when the soul is cleansed of impurities, like a second chance.³ The name “Phlebas” originates from phleps (the genitive is phlebos), the Greek word for “vein.”

Eliot (1888–1965) lived in the same era as Harold Gillies (1882–1960), when the techniques of plastic surgery had not been established. Gillies’ experiences with head and facial injuries during World War I formed the basis of craniofacial surgery. The surgical experiences that plastic surgeons accumulated by treating injured faces led to the development of aesthetic surgery.⁴ Plastic surgeons can now bypass the stages of age and rejuvenate the appearance of older adults by performing rhytidectomy. We can use the whirlpool of their own blood flow to make them as handsome as young people.

In “The Burial of the Dead,” the author writes that human eyes look like pearls. “Here, said she / Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor / Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!” Although our patients are becoming older, we might be able to give them a perpetually young appearance if only they maintain a firm will to remain young, like the “pearl eyes.”