“April is the cruellest month…” begins the first line of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The poem is thought to be a portrayal of universal despair, where we lie in wait between the unrelenting force of spring and the dead contrast of winter, and the casualty of the warring seasons is eventually hope. In the bold display of life’s unending, futile circles, one can be left to wonder at the point of it all. Does everything simply fade into a waste land? Is death the last, desperate word? Perhaps it was somewhere between the war of winter and spring when the prophet reeled over life’s abrupt and senseless end. “In the prime of my life must I go through the gates of death and be robbed of the rest of my years? For the grave cannot praise you, death cannot sing your praise. The living, the living—they praise you as I am doing today.”(1)

Though differing in degree and conclusions, art and literature are unapologetically full of a sense of this deep irony, often expressing itself in futility. Euripides, writing in the fifth century, remarks,

“…and so we are sick for life, and cling

On earth to this nameless and shining thing.

For other life is a fountain sealed,

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