Women in Love - Prufrock's White Flannel Trousers

A passage that evokes some Eliot, another interesting connection with Prufrock:

He laughed. Gudrun looked aside, feeling she was being belittled. People were standing about in groups, some women were sitting in the shade of the walnut tree, with cups of tea in their hands, a waiter in evening dress was hurrying round, some girls were simpering with parasols, some young men, who had just come in from rowing, were sitting cross-legged on the grass, coatless, their shirt-sleeves rolled up in manly fashion, their hands resting on their white flannel trousers, their gaudy ties floating about, as they laughed and tried to be witty with the young damsels. 'Why,' thought Gudrun churlishly, 'don't they have the manners to put their coats on, and not to assume such intimacy in their appearance.' She abhorred the ordinary young man, with his hair plastered back, and his easy-going chumminess. -pp.135-6  

These are exactly the sort of men Prufrock aspires to:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think they will sing to me.

Read the full poem, Eliot's 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' - http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/eliot.html  

Women in Love - Between the Desire and the Spasm falls The Shadow

On many occasions, usually prolonged and sustained till resolution, I have felt paralysed by the anxiety of an obligation to be doing something with my life, to be producing something, industrious, full of purpose and focus.  And it is because of this overwhelming anxiety that I have in some cases failed to act and do as deliberately as I perhaps could and should have done, in fact restricting myself by looking for well worn paths to productivity.  As with many of these cuttings, the following conversation fills me with a nice sense of comfort both in its discussion of my feeling and in a fundamental sense of empowering me with a further ability to articulate these feelings afforded by the diverse use of language - something which I hope all these cuttings in some way facilitate.

'I DO enjoy things—don't you?' she asked.

'Oh yes! But it infuriates me that I can't get right, at the really growing part of me. I feel all tangled and messed up, and I CAN'T get straight anyhow. I don't know what really to DO. One must do something somewhere.'

'Why should you always be DOING?' she retorted. 'It is so plebeian. I think it is much better to be really patrician, and to do nothing but just be oneself, like a walking flower.'

'I quite agree,' he said, 'if one has burst into blossom. But I can't get my flower to blossom anyhow. Either it is blighted in the bud, or has got the smother-fly, or it isn't nourished. Curse it, it isn't even a bud. It is a contravened knot.' -pp.106-107

I especially like the final metaphor.  I wonder also if Lawrence is not only talking about the general human condition but also differentiating between the genders.  Regardless, a fantastic poem to read for more thought provoking sentiments on action and inaction is T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' which has haunted me for many many years.  Here's a snippet followed by a link to the full poem:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/

The Great Gatsby - Carraway and Prufrock

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night, and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were lined five deep with throbbing taxicabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes made unintelligible circles inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well. - pp.37-38 (Wordsworth Classics, 1993)

COMPARE:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .

- 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', T.S. Eliot,
- http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/eliot.html

It is interesting that Carraway then immediately turns to the topic of Jordan Baker, the famed golf champion and mild love interest though he does well to explicitly state: 'I wasn't actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity'.