Description
Educational/therapeutic goals: To talk about meaning of life
Recommended age of group: Adults
Style of work: With group
Brief content of the story:
The poet presents a person who is tired of life. The lyrical self talks about ordinary things and gradually dives deeper until it touches the deepest topics about the meaning of life. This existential poem deepens the suffocating mundanity and ordinariness. It ilustrates the ordinary people whose houses are coffins and they lie inside like the dead. The question is whether these people can free themselves from the grayness of everyday life. The author gradually lightens the poem and ends it with a large dose of sincere joy and gratitude. There are ways to find beauty and goodness in the ordinary.
Description of the possibilities of professional pedagogical/therapeutic work:
I offer a processing option for a group session. The topic of the group is the meaning of life.
0. Everyone draws a Dixit card and expresses how it relates to them with the theme of the meaning
of life.
1. Reading the poem.
2. Discuss what is recorded in the poem. What are the individual observations?
3. Everyone chooses a sentence or a word that touches them in some way.
4. Focused writing phase. Everyone comments on the poem and what interested them the most
about it. Participants can work with the selected sentence or word, they can transform it, or shape it
in a different way.
5. Let´s share the experiences with each other.
6. Finishing phase. Ending a sentence, thought, or story by naming the problem but at the same time
expressing gratitude or by using the sentence of the poem:
„Now I confess, that kneeling on the floor
I thanked for all this, humbled to the core.”
What are you grateful for in your life?
Description of the recommender’s experience from his own work with this work:
Once I read this book to a very young boy at school. He had temper management problems, was aggressive, and was often angry at the whole world. We didn’t draw, we just talked the whole time. At the end of the session, he indicated that he didn’t even know that other people felt the same way, and that we should talk about it again next time. The book helped open up this boy.
The card of the recommended work according to the mentioned literary source was created by:
Kürthy Anna, Workplace: Zichy Miklós Primary School in Zsámbék
Date last updated: 2023. 08. 12.
Recommended citation procedure:
Kürthy Anna. 2023.
Recommended professional procedure to the work with literary masterpiece of Kosztolányi Dezső. In Kotrbová, K. et al: Biblioterapia.sk. Bratislava: PRO SKIZP – Association to support the development of the Slovak Chamber of Clinical Physics, Laboratory Diagnosticians, Language Speech Therapists and Therapeutic Pedagogues, 2023. ISBN 978-80-974667-0-1 Available on: https://www.biblioterapia.sk/en/publikacia/reccomended-procedure-to-literary-work-daybreak-drunkenness/
This article was created thanks to the support of the the program of the European Union Erasmus+, Key action 2 – Cooperation among organizations and institutions, KA210 – Small-scale partnerships for cooperation in the field of vocational education and training. Project title „Prototype of the on-line study tool for bibliotherapy”, project number 2022-1-SK01-KA210-VET-000082483. It represents the opinion of the author only and European Commission is not responsible for any use of the informations contained therein.
