Overview[]
Ecclesiastes is a book and often considered as an autobiography of Koheleth, or the Preacher. Ecclesiastes is
Koheleth
one of the 3 sections that made makes up the Hebrew Bible and it is also part of the Old Testament. The author of Ecclesiastes is in fact unknown. Koheleth is a description of the narrator who assumed the position of a preacher.
Ecclesiastes is a collection of poems that discuss the meaning of life. Koheleth's messege is that "all life is meaningless". Life has been bequetathed bequeathed upon man by the divine forces of heaven. God is man's creator and destroyer. Life no matter how short or long, how happy or tragic, how virtous or vicious one have has lived will one day cease to be on the earthly realm, and the spiritis that departed will return to where to they came from. It is then man's duty to live, and the apprpreciate the gift of God.
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"Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil" | |
Connection to The Waste Land[]
Eliot himself has noted the line 23 "A heap of broken images, where the sun beats" is an allusion to Ecclesiastes 12. A heap of broken images is an indication that man's perception of life is distorted, that we do not see things the same way and for the way it really is. In fact we cannot see the world for what it really is but we can only interpret it. It is because of this that man needs to be guided, and it is the prophets who shall make them see.
Perhaps Eliot is saying man does not know how to live because in the end everything will end. We exist here on Earth yet our existaence seems so light. The unbearable lightness of being has led men astray.