"Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space"
About this Quote
Frost’s line lands like a diagnosis disguised as a sigh: modern life hasn’t just expanded our horizons, it’s dilated our appetites until they ache. “Space” isn’t only the literal frontier - the new geography of trains, highways, and (soon enough) rockets - but the psychic condition of too-muchness: more distance, more options, more emptiness to fill. The verb “ails” pins modernity as bodily, not philosophical. We don’t merely contemplate vastness; we catch it, carry it, suffer symptoms.
What makes the sentence bite is its reversal of the usual progress narrative. Space is supposed to liberate: bigger houses, wider worlds, room to breathe. Frost treats it as an illness, suggesting that expansion can corrode the older human arts of inhabiting, committing, staying put. “We are sick with space” implies intoxication as much as infection - a craving for the next acreage, the next frontier, the next blank spot on the map. It’s not just that we have space; space has us.
The historical context matters. Frost writes from a century when America is rapidly reorganizing itself around mobility and scale: industrial sprawl, urbanization, the romance of the open road, the early mythology of air travel. Against that, Frost’s poetry often insists on boundaries - walls, roads, property lines, small choices with permanent consequences. The subtext is almost moral: a culture that fetishizes expansion risks losing the intimate pressures that make meaning. Too much room can thin a life out.
What makes the sentence bite is its reversal of the usual progress narrative. Space is supposed to liberate: bigger houses, wider worlds, room to breathe. Frost treats it as an illness, suggesting that expansion can corrode the older human arts of inhabiting, committing, staying put. “We are sick with space” implies intoxication as much as infection - a craving for the next acreage, the next frontier, the next blank spot on the map. It’s not just that we have space; space has us.
The historical context matters. Frost writes from a century when America is rapidly reorganizing itself around mobility and scale: industrial sprawl, urbanization, the romance of the open road, the early mythology of air travel. Against that, Frost’s poetry often insists on boundaries - walls, roads, property lines, small choices with permanent consequences. The subtext is almost moral: a culture that fetishizes expansion risks losing the intimate pressures that make meaning. Too much room can thin a life out.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
