The Hollow Men
In the poem The Hollow Men, T. S. Eliot writes about the spiritual emptiness of modernity, paralysis of the spirit, and a civilization that has lost touch with meaning and faith. What characterizes the men in the poem is that they are hollow. I have been thinking about that specific choice of word, hollow rather than empty. A hollow man can be filled with something meaningless, whereas an empty man is simply empty. Eliot describes them as “stuffed men”. The bleak reality of a horizontally oriented society is that one fills oneself with trivialities and lacks higher meaning, which leads to wandering aimlessly or searching for meaning in the wrong direction. For Eliot, the true direction is upward, toward God. “For Thine is the Kingdom.” In our time, social media fills the void. This loss of direction has consequences; it is a danger to us, to our lives, and to our civilization. Perhaps the most famous part is the ending of the poem. 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 with a whimper. On some days, these words feel as though they carry the weight of destiny.
