Stacey D’Erasmo came to Writers in the Parlor yesterday and read from her newest book, The Sky Below. At one point someone asked a question about the relationship between The Sky Below and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Part of her reply to this question really struck me:

In ancient Greek or Roman Mythology, when a mortal reached a point of maximum emotion—maximum grief, maximum terror, maximum love—the gods would take pity on her and transform her into a part of nature (a tree, a flower). Somehow this act of transformation—this transmutation into nature—made it safe, allowed her to transcend this maximum feeling.

Stacey put it much more eloquently than I just did, but this idea that humans are capable of experiencing so much feeling that it becomes literally unbearable seemed beatiful to me.