Whither Hollow?

The first time I read TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men," I had no familiarity with Guy Fawkes & only a vague understanding of the post-World-War-I world about which he was writing.  I just knew that at times I felt a little (or a lot) hollow.  I was a teenager, & looking for words that would either echo how I felt or attempt to fill that hollowness.  Eliot did both.

I am somewhat more solid in my middle age, but still occasionally fill that I'm not entirely filled by life. I watch movies, listen to music, read books, sometimes even talk to people.  But of course there's always a hollowness.  Old friends that I used to know on Usenet would tell me in one word what it is: angst.

I'm trying to remember if eighteen-year-old me thought that some day that hollow feeling would be gone.  The more-than-twice-that me thinks it might be a little boring if that were the case.  I would have to find another reason to listen to music, for example - which I suppose could be interesting, to only listen to music for something technical, like composition or artistry - but it wouldn't be me, & it might make me turn my back on music I have always loved.  Very little that I loved at one time seems strange or immature or "other" to me.  I am very rarely embarrassed, as some people are, at what I "used to listen to."

Some of my friends, in fact, are more embarrassed for me for what I listen to now.

It's my way of saying, I suppose, that there's always a part of me that's going to be hollow.

I just asked my wife, who's an anatomist, what parts of the human body are hollow.  There are a lot of them: the stomach, the intestines, the bladder, the nasal cavity, the maxillary sinuses, the lateral cervical triangle, among others.  She even said, "The cranium is hollow, until you stick a brain in it," as if she were a mad scientist.

Those are the physical parts of me that'll always be hollow.  But it turns out there's more.  & probably always will be.