Eliot explores this paradox of pain as the space of deadness and aloneness in much of his poetry. In the first eighteen lines of The Waste Land he sees it both inside and out: "memory and desire," the rain and the beer garden, the mosaic of the totally unconnected events of the sleigh ride and the whodunit as nightly "distraction from distraction," the desperate flight that is contrary to nature: "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." The poem presents a disconnected space, psychically and socially, of anguished Peter Pans.