If writers are but the engineers of the human soul, then I consider it not only my intention, but duty to profess the very living and breathing emotions wrought upon the soul.

Pain, anguish and suffering cannot be escaped, but their burdensome nature may indeed be lifted by the words used to express the abundant misery that they cause.

For a writer who claims to be able to paint a picture with words to then withdraw him or herself and refrain from doing so is not only shirking responsibility, but admitting defeat to the very atrocities that arrest the soul.

How many times in literature have we come across expressions such as:

‘…such as no language can describe’

‘Inexplicable grief’

‘No utterance capable of expressing’

Doubtless there are others, but these are just a few I have found.

Can it really be that the intensity can be such that words cease to express meaning? And yet it is in their cessation that we are infiltrated with clichés that render the value of such emotion useless; and thus the reader has no concept of what spurred such speechlessness and is left bewildered, abandoned and at the mercy of the writer whose very profession it was to portray with words the mystery of the human soul.

Or perhaps, young and naïve as I may be, it is that I haven’t experienced sufficient pain and suffering for the very words that first described them to become worthless remnants of what too, may become a lost art.

I hope with all my heart that this may not be the case. I hope that one day a new wave of writers may rise up to depict with words, the grief and sorrows that afflict our generation. Even if there is nothing novel in it, at least we can say we share the same pain in which our predecessors suffered terribly.

And yet there is no use in harking back to the ages of writers, who although related the portrayal of grief in such a timeless nature, have now become obsolete in a generation that favours post modernity over antiquity.

One need only look to Shakespeare or Greek tragedy to understand the profundity of emotion experienced in the wake of soul-destroying events.

In Shakespeare’s ‘The tragedy of Anthony and Cleopatra’, we witness just how profoundly Cleopatra is afflicted with grief by the loss of her lover:

“Shall I abide in this dull world, which in thy absence is no better than a sty?”

Shakespeare did it. He mastered the effect grief has upon humanity and indeed the representation of stoicism on the part of his protagonist, Cleopatra.

Where then, are the writers of the modern era? It is my sincere hope that the writers of today (my aspiring-self included) should attempt to scale the brilliance of writers gone past in hope to be on a par with all that they achieved.