It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.
The more things happen to you the more you can't
Tell or remember even what they were.
The contradictions cover such a range.
The talk would talk and go so far aslant.
You don't want madhouse and the whole thing there.

 In a review of Cleanth Brooks’s  Modern Poetry and Tradition  from 1939, Empson expands on what he might mean by “contradictions”, challenging Brooks’s reading of what he called 
 the frozen agony of  The Waste Land … He denies that there is any “despair” in the poem, and thinks critics who have said there was have misunderstood it. To be sure, it does not say that people can never be happy,  but the poetry of flat contradiction is almost a clinical thing; it can only be done well as a way of treating yourself for a terrible state of mind.  We had a lot of people trying to do that in England after Eliot… it seems to me that Mr Brooks’s approach tends to treat the concentration of horror as no more than the balanced tone of good sense 
 (emphasis added) 
 Put more simply in the context of this poem: Empson didn’t much fancy experiencing the same despair as  T.S. Eliot .
Let It Go