Love Quote by Judith Wright

The line lands with the sting of a poet admitting that art isn’t a hobby but a life-support system. Judith Wright describes a stark binary: either she is “deeply engaged” in creation or she’s anesthetized by TV. Anything in between is not rest, not neutrality, but ache. The phrasing refuses romance. “Empty,” “hurt,” “hollow” are blunt, bodily words; the sentence rhythm mimics the slide from feeling to dissociation. Then comes the pivot to the uncanny: “wispy ghost.” She’s not claiming melodrama so much as diagnosing a modern form of non-being, where the self becomes vapor when it isn’t anchored to attention.

The subtext is cultural as much as personal. TV stands in as an easy proxy for mass distraction, a soft, socially sanctioned way to not feel. Wright doesn’t merely scold it; she places it in the same sentence as creative work, implying they serve parallel functions: both can swallow you whole. One is chosen absorption, the other outsourced absorption. The cost of either is that ordinary life can start to feel intolerably thin.

Context matters: Wright’s work is steeped in Australian landscape, ecological grief, and moral witness. For a poet carrying that kind of pressure, “creative activities” aren’t escapism; they’re an attempt to make contact with reality at full volume. The horror here isn’t sadness. It’s the fear that without making, without intensity, the self becomes spectral - present in body, absent in meaning.