A moment of oblivion

Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;

Within this section of The Dry Salvages lies all that Joyce was working with and through in his Araby story. These two pieces of literature go hand so well together due to the fact that they are both experiencing the agony of time through the emotion of anxiety. Joyce explores the emotion(s) that are experienced through the inability to control time, or better yet our personal time during an age of dependence and lack of authority. The boy's only wish is to demonstrate his feelings for the girl, and yet he feels that money and gifts are needed to do so. His realization concerning this fact causes him to feel vain and angry. Both are relatable to the passage above due to the specific language that is used in the poem. Words like "calculate", "deception", and "futureless" resonate with undertones of anxiety and a bitterness from lack of control. Just as Erin points out in one of her blogs, Nabokov might be pissed that I am trying to read into things that are not really there; never-the-less I agree with what she says about Joyce's call for the necessity of interpretation of underlying meanings behind words. One might refer to this hidden language as the emotional response of reader. So, yes, I am projecting myslef into Eliot's poem, because that is how I get something out of it.

As for when the boy recognizes the emotions that he is feeling in the end of the story, it is as if time itself-even if for only a split second-stops. This moment is the moment "when time stops and time is never ending". As we all know time really doesn't stop, but our emotions can deceive us into believing that time isn't real. A fight for instance, can have this effect. The same goes for epiphanies as well. In Nick's blog, he gives a wonderful definition of epiphany which begins with "a slow change in one's consciousness", and to me this is the moment without time. A moment of oblivion, very similar to the experience of important realizations, like that of the boy's feelings.