Soul, Identity & the Modern Condition

        In the present time there are always distractions and most lives are filled with needs and acts of fulfilling or over-fulfilling those needs. Time is a critical commodity and is readily traded for money, an intermediary to one's wants and needs. Because time is never in abundance there is always a need to be more efficient or faster or simply to stop wasting time. This tendency makes it easy, if not simply a part of the way of life, to get pulled along with the goings on, the antithesis of stopping, resting, waiting and enjoying the moment, retreats. Not to imply in any way that no one ever relaxes or goes on vacation, but instead that doing so is taken in moderation and easy to neglect or miss entirely. Another aspect of being swept up in the goings on is feeling confused, and lost; as people are after realizing that places, people, their very lives have slipped out of their hands after working for years, and having had too little time to pay attention. This is the nature of the modern condition.
        This collection of poems visits these issues critically, examining them and attempting to describe this modern condition. It asks for elaboration on the important questions of its nature. The questions this collection focuses on are ones related to identity, how one sees oneself in the world, one’s position, and one's roll. It also offers reflections on soul, the means by which one comes into answers to these questions of identity – or more simply put, how one interacts with ones surroundings, learns how to live in the world. The poems take critically this modern situation and look for difficulties that exist in it. The goal is not to discuss it as the "modern problem", i.e. the problem of the 20th century with which "we" alone struggle. The earliest poem dates back to 1807 and concerns itself with much of the same issues as the others which were written one to two hundred years later. This makes the point that “modern problem” predates the modern era and is instead alive throughout the contemporary era. This condition is not so much a problem as a perpetual situation. Getting caught up in life does not need a computer or cell phone or car, but is simply a part of one's mentalities, one's culture. The collection would also be insufficient only to ask these questions without providing responses or solutions to the difficulties of the situation and so most of the poems concern themselves with a response that is especially directed at a closer relationship with nature.
        The Unknown Citizen, first in the collection, provides a wonderful description of a completely average man from the 1900s, and attempts to sum him up with facts about his life, finally raising questions as to his happiness which the speaker cannot answer. The collection continues with Directive, where the speaker leaves the "now" of present day and the Unknown Citizen behind, journeying into both the past and the childhood for answers to resolve the confusion of the "now", indirectly answering Auden’s questions in a more general way. Then in The World is Too Much With Us, Wordsworth ventures into a similar solution to the fragmentation of the "now", this time emphasizing nature as the healer. Next in The Peace of Wild Things, Berry seeks refuge in nature, but does not need a creed for it as Wordsworth did, instead enjoying it as it is. Mary Oliver goes further in elaborating on nature as the refuge, the healing and the calming force that Berry found. Finally, Lucia Perillo writes about the destruction of such a peaceful place forcing her back towards the modern world.
Enjoy!

Begin this path: Gratz-Introduction

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