A Writer Looks At the Void

We are all familiar with a frightening sense of aloneness, emptiness, loss of connection to people and events. We know it personally, we know it psychologically and philosophically. As with some other stubborn demons, insight and knowledge do not forever banish or control these plaguing states of mind or mood, moments in which a crack has been made in our daily structures and the universe with all its distance slips in, overwhelms us, reminds us of our death, robs us of our single significance, and leaves us paralyzed under a sense of vacancy that merely echoes the vacancy of the skies.

In small children, infants and toddlers, we speak of separation anxiety, of the struggle to be an individual, to be apart from the mothering figure, and there are moments in that developmental struggle when it seems natural and normal for the child in our society to experience a sense of loss so deep he feels himself empty, disconnected, purposeless, and helpless. Most little children, just like the rest of us, learn that these unpleasant feelings come and go. But of course for many the mother is either depressed or unavailable or the environment is so chaotic and disturbing that seemingly irreparable psychic damage occurs, and the child is unable to connect to the loved object and is forever orbiting within the confines of his or her own mind. These kinds of disturbances, which the psychiatric profession sees with increasing frequency, are of course personal and private tragedies spreading patterns of failure from generation to generation. But they also reflect a social failure — why are so many of us fragmented and apart from one another?

In adults we speak of anxiety states or depersonalized feelings, and there are a variety of expressions to describe certain aspects of these awesome feelings, feelings that really signal the incapacity of the person to reach out to another and truly connect. Some adults are more often overcome than others, and some are so frequently overcome that th