“We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us.”
― How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry
Medicate such sorrow away | QOTW
It would appear that things have gotten worse in the 20+ years since he published that volume. Warmest regards, Theo
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Yes, I would say the same about mental anguish/stress which results in general/moderate anxiety/depression. I don’t think people pay enough attention to the influence of environment on our health, including mental health— which not everybody perceives so acutely in the first place. I think that the most sensitive people are useful barometers of these things, because they feel more the effects of things like social isolation/lack of community, or sensory stress (e.g. noise pollution), which actually affect everyone a lot.
I think people feel a lack of choice or empowerment in it— because the default solution ingrained into people is that they should earn enough money to be able to solve these problems for themselves, individually. Which I can understand. So the medication is to assist in continuing with the ‘rat race’, to use an extreme term haha. Basically, so much of self-worth is tied up in capitalism.
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