Shikasta revisited 2

There was a time in my life - and I think it started in my childhood and just carried on, when I used to experience what I can only describe as a deep well of sadness. It used to come and go, sometimes just a background thing, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity. I still have it to a certain extent - it's why I weep in films or certain passages of books (Shikasta is one) with alarming frequency.  I kind of shook it off as a defining part of me about fifteen  years ago, with  a newer more outwardly successful period of my life, but it still returns to possess me at times.  It's strangely not unpleasant, not like  a cut or a blow or  a terrible event, or feeling cold or angry or frightened, but it is quite debilitating and all-consuming when it happens. It's like I get absolutely overwhelmed with empathy - it might be a film, a book, or, often, having children, it was seeing some small or large  hurt or disappointment that I could not remedy, and the distress would soak through my consciousness as if I were plunged into a pool of sadness and it had permeated every part of me. At home, out in the street I would have to exert enormous power not to openly weep, I wouldn't be able to speak without choking over the words.

The defining pull or feel of the "zone" though which the protaganist, Johor, approaches Shikasta, is described as nostalgia:

"Zone Six can present to the unprepared every sort of check, delay, and exhaustion. This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – ‘nostalgia’ is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined. Chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, the half-created and the unfulfilled throng here,..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Locations 115-117). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

In Zone 6 lost souls congregate in what was a lush and green place, but now is dust and desert, waiting for the chance to reincarnate and "try again".   The narrative then describes Johor's meeting with some of the people that he had known, and  the distress, the grief, the pull that he feels for them - he sums it up like this:

" Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Location 204). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

And it does feel, of all the emotions the most useless in terms of getting anything done - and yet, and yet, without the sensitivity and empathy that so debilitates me at times I would not be who I am, I would not have achieved the things I have done.

Doris Lessing was a pretty direct and no nonsense sort of person - the few times I met her we had short conversations about writing, the coffee, nothing of great significance, but she always had this questioning, inquisitive mindset.  "What do you write about?" I remember her saying when we were sitting together before a seminar in London, and she was genuinely interested. But she catches this sense of the strength of emotions, the importance of them and the destructive nature of their not being kept in check, not being recognised for what they are, across all her books I suspect her sense of empathy was just as strong as anybody's. 
There's a story she tells of walking though post war bombed out London, with a small child, cold foggy, and she is walking with tears streaming down her cheeks. A man stopped her and said "What is the matter?" She answered him, and then he just said "Oh well something will turn up", and walked off. As I recall the interviewer said something along the lines of "oh, that's terrible", and I think she said, "No, it was the best thing he could have said, because, of course, something did turn up."

So lastly, a talk that Doris Lessing gave, one of a series on Sufism in that inordinately posh voice of hers - don't let it put you off.
Doris Lessing talks about- well quite a lot actually