Summer’s heat and humidity can be a Petri dish for the doldrums, that figurative name we give to despair spawned of monotony and lethargy—a ceaseless sameness of no escape. In other words, Stuck. It rhymes with ….
In reality, the Doldrums are an equatorial region of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans where extremely low-pressure zaps the wind from the air. Not a problem if you have another source of power, but being trapped for weeks on becalmed waters drove some old-time, wind-dependent mariners to madness—and some to an early grave.
Myriads of books embody the pathos of stuckedness with many variations on the theme: some literal, others figurative; the man-made, self-made and forces of nature; some characters who are temporarily bound and others who never manage the great escape.