Probing Question: Fishhooks of addiction
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 - 15:21
in Paleontology & Archaeology
When the American writer Theodore Roethke taught at Penn State from 1936 to 1943, he was known for three things: being a good poet, coaching the men`s tennis team, and falling down drunk, perhaps the latter more than the former. Roethke, a brilliant and tortured man, knew well the seduction of drink and the agony of addiction. In his poem “Journey Into the Interior,” Roethke writes, “In the long journey out of the self, / There are many detours, washed-out interrupted raw places / Where the shale slides dangerously / And the back wheels hang almost over the edge / At the sudden veering, the moment of turning.”