Sunday Pages: "The Hollow Men"

A poem by T.S. Eliot

Dear Reader,

The owner of the Boring Company is himself boring—profoundly, inescapably, painfully boring. He radiates boringness. Shorn of the grotesque wealth (itself the product more of luck and privilege than talent), Elon Musk is the guy you don’t want to get stuck sitting next to on a flight to LAX. He is endlessly fascinated with himself, and wants so badly to convince you that he is smart, clever, witty, insightful, deep, when he is nothing but a shit-posting bore. I’m already tired of thinking about him, but then, I was tired of thinking about Trump, too, and these two dullards are peas from the same boring, blighted pod.

In 2007, Neil Strauss wrote a profile of Musk for Rolling Stone. He happened to be there at the moment when Musk’s then-girlfriend dumped him (a frequent occurrence in the billionaire’s dating life, apparently). Strauss is put in the strange position of having to talk the subject of his cover story off the ledge. Musk even asks the journalist if he knows anyone who might want to go out with him—he’s that desperate, that terrified of spending even one night by his lonesome. Strauss writes:

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there— and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

There’s truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It’s lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

“When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Is it too reductive to suggest that Musk is willing to pony up a sizable chunk of change just to avoid people running for the hills when he shows up?

On Friday, I ran a podcast interview with the historian Brandon Gauthier, whose new book, Before Evil, examines the lives of homicidal dictators as young men. Both the Former Guy and the Boring Guy possess many of the disturbing attributes of the juvenile dictators Gauthier writes about. By the skin of our teeth, we managed to survive four years of the former. I’m not sure our democracy can withstand the latter gaining full, private control of the world’s most important social media platform.

There is already enough disinformation on Twitter. If Mr. Free Speech has his way, the worst of the worst—chaos agents who have been eighty-sixed from the platform—will make their angry return. It will be like in Superman II when the nuclear explosion releases General Zod and friends from their two-dimensional prison. All hell will break loose. And Musk will titter like Lex Luthor with hairplugs.

I know I just shared one of T.S. Eliot’s poems a few weeks ago, but thinking about Trump and Musk and their supercharged boringness calls to mind another of Eliot’s works: “The Hollow Men.” Published in 1925, the five-part poem begins with an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. And unlike “The Waste Land,” this one requires little commentary beyond suggesting that “Death’s other kingdom” ain’t heaven.

This is the first of the five parts:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
   
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
   
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

So much aridity in that imagery! If it were any drier, Ben Shapiro would feel compelled to weigh in. Desert souls, parched people, devoid of water, devoid of—pun very much intended—élan vital.

Why are the hollow men consigned to Hell? Eliot hints at the reason in the well-known last lines of the five-part poem. This is meant, I think, to be read in a sing-song voice, like a child’s nursery rhyme (italics are in the original text):

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Keep the Hollow Man the fuck away from Twitter.

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Photo credit: Tim White. Scarecrow.