flâneur

thalassophilia - by hannah - a lot about nothing

hannahgao.substack.com · 1,682 words · saved by 2 readers

Lately I’ve been restless as ever. I miss home and all its people and real seasons where all the leaves color the sky orange-red and dance swirling in the sweeping wind. I miss the vastness of the cornfields, so thick you could drown in it — a midwestern thalassophiliac. It’s the kind of empty space that you can only fill with the thoughts of leaving (in all senses of the word). It’s home, the same as it was 19 years ago and the same it will be in 19 more, just as I left it. How ironic is it that Indiana is a landlocked state? Recently, I came across the term oceanic feeling, coined by Romain Rolland in a letter to Freud. He used it to describe a sensation of ‘eternity’, an unbounded union with the universe. He attributed this incredible, metaphysical state to the source of all religious energy, the universal god. Freud, in his response, dismissed this as a deformity: a vestigial sensation left over from infancy, when the borders of the world haven’t yet formed, and the edges of the eg

Lately I’ve been restless as ever. I miss home and all its people and real seasons where all the leaves color the sky orange-red and dance swirling in the sweeping wind. I miss the vastness of the cornfields, so thick you could drown in it — a midwestern thalassophiliac. It’s the kind of empty space that you can only fill with the thoughts of leaving (in all senses of the word). It’s home, the same as it was 19 years ago and the same it will be in 19 more, just as I left it. How ironic is it that Indiana is a landlocked state? Recently, I came across the term oceanic feeling, coined by…

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