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February 01, 2006
Judith Oster's "On Desert Places"
"He once wrote: '[poets] are so much less sensitive from having overused their sensibilities. Men who have to feel for a living would unavoidably become altogether unfeeling except professionally' (SL 300). Whatever the basis, the poem ends with the fear of one's own emptiness, one's own nothingness. To traverse these spaces inside the self is to traverse the barren."
Oster raises a fascinating point - at what point does anyone overload themselves emotionally to the point that they lose the ability to feel at all? It's been suggested that this is why clinical psychiatrists have one of the highest suicide rates of any profession. Maybe the empty spaces within come from overloading our emotional circuits until they fizzle out.
Posted by MeganRitter at February 1, 2006 04:39 PM