Reading The Waste Land During a Deploy
There is a line in The Waste Land that I have been carrying around for years, the way other people carry a phone charger: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
I used to think it was about grief. Now I think it’s about version control.
Fragments
Eliot wrote the poem out of pieces — quotations in six languages, broken allusions, voices that start and stop without warning. Critics spent decades arguing about whether it was a unified work or a beautiful accident. The answer, I’ve decided, is that it’s both, and that this is the only way serious things get made: you collect fragments, you shore them against the ruins, and you hope the structure holds.
This is also, as far as I can tell, how software works. A codebase is a fragment collection. The commit that fixes the bug from March sits next to the comment from 2019 that no one understands, next to the library that was abandoned but can’t be removed. We shore these fragments against our ruins, and the build goes green, and the site ships.
April
“April is the cruellest month” — I’ve seen many arguments about what Eliot meant. My theory: he was doing a release on the first of the month and the staging environment broke.
No, seriously — the cruellest month is the one where you inherit someone else’s repository. Every poem is an inheritance. Every codebase is a séance.
The thunder
The poem ends with “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.” — give, sympathise, control. Sanskrit for the three disciplines the wasted land lacks.
I once misread it as a deploy checklist:
- Datta — give: write the documentation, leave the notes, hand over the context.
- Dayadhvam — sympathise: the next developer is a person with a deadline and a headache, not an adversary.
- Damyata — control: the boat responds to the hand on the tiller; the system responds to the person who understands it.
Then the thunder speaks, the script ends, and the deploy goes green. Somewhere, Eliot is rolling his eyes. Somewhere, a build log scrolls like a river.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins. — I keep it in a comment at the top of my main file, where it belongs.