There are things that no one will ever know about you. You will live your life possessing qualities,
thoughts, and feelings that no one else, nothing else, will ever know. Like a lockbox of secrets
about the natural world, the phenomena rising out from the universe inside your head will be
exclusively yours until the end of everything. The things you never tell anyone, the things you never
admit, the things you can never access or share because you don’t have the words, will all remain
forever real but hidden parts of the cosmos. In part, this is profoundly beautiful. We
each have secrets kept between us and configurations of the universe’s matter
that always keeps its promise to never tell. But also, this can be incredibly isolating.
There is so much in our mind that no one will ever touch, that will never be consoled,
will never be reassured, will never hear anyone say I understand. So much of what we think
and feel is simply too odd or disconcerting to share with anyone. And even if we do, it’s often
filtered into some vague, watered-down version. It isn’t our fault. The mind seems inbuilt with this
filter and sensitivity: a need for acceptance and favorable appearance. Our skull is merely armor
for the pink, naked, pasty body inside it, afraid of the world seeing it for what it really is.
Even if you are someone who considers yourself very open, confident, forthright, there are
undeniably still things that no one knows about you: thoughts and reactions that you recoil at
and push back down into the unconscious mind. And even the things you do share, often times still,
no one ever fully understands what you mean. And then, of course, there are all the things
that you don’t even really understand about yourself and all the things you can’t share,
even if you wanted to. All the strange sensations we might refer to as weird, or anxious, or tired,
or sad, or anything else, never really get anywhere close to the abstract kaleidoscope
of what it is really like inside your head. Words always fall flat at the foot of what
something is really like, restrained by language’s limited ability to share only the symbols of thing
and never what things really are. One can only wonder what we don’t know about ourselves as a
species collectively that everyone experiences, feels, or thinks, but no one does or can share
because we lack the words or means to do so. Near the end of his life, the prominent and
socially active German writer Goethe said, “No one has ever properly understood me,
I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.”
We are all made of different particles constructed at different times and places,
sent off on different tracks of time and space. No one ever has and no one ever will experience the
exact physical track you are traveling across the universe. We are all the sole conductor on a train
with no passengers. The byproduct of this is an inherent existential loneliness: a background hum
we all hear, unsure of whether or not anyone else does or if it’s just inside our head.
Ironically, though, this feeling of separateness, of isolation, seems to connect us all.
In his novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote, “Everybody is identical in
their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.”
We can all relate to the feeling of how little others can seem to relate to exactly how we feel.
And yet, somehow, despite all this, loneliness is still often seen as something that only
so-called lonely people feel: losers, social outcasts, recluses, and so on. But in truth,
the only difference amongst people in this world is the degree of loneliness felt. Of course,
there are different degrees. Loneliness in extreme forms where someone experiences isolation
or conditions in which their particular need for social interaction is not met, can be debilitating
and lead to physical and psychological problems. These forms are not necessarily something to
just write off as inevitable and without reason and possibility to improve. But the point is,
even the most socially engaged person and the most content socially introverted person still possess
some form of loneliness. And it only goes up from there. “Loneliness,” wrote psychologist Carl Jung,
“does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things
that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.”
Arguably, we all experience this inability and discord on some level. And so,
we all experience some level of this sort of existential loneliness. And the perverse
societal perception of loneliness only makes many of us feel more so; a sense that we are
uniquely alone in the feeling. And so, perhaps what we need is the occasional reminder,
that to feel separate, to feel strange, to feel mad, to feel like no one knows, connects us all.
We are perhaps the least alone when we feel we are.
One place we can often look to find this reminder is art and philosophy, in the broadest
sense—literature, music, poetry, paintings, or whatever else it is that shows us that, like
inside us, complex, hidden things are also inside others. If not the same things, at least the
same feeling that there are things difficult to share. Creating and consuming art and philosophy
intimates the abstract or forbidden parts of ourselves that we haven’t yet really found the
people, the courage, or the ways to share. What we tell to a page, what we hear with a note, what
we understand with a stroke, are often secrets we would never or could never know or tell otherwise.
Art and philosophy don’t help us deal with our existential loneliness by reconciling the
dissonance between ourselves and the world, but rather, by allowing us to connect over the shared
isolation we all feel. There can never fully be a bridge built between the world and our mind,
but meaningful works of art and philosophy are like cliffed coasts we can occasionally
stand on to see that there are others out there, stranded and alone, just like us.
In the words of David Foster Wallace: [Literature] is one of the few experiences
where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up,
loud parties—all these chase loneliness away by making me forget my name’s Dave
and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry,
music . . . in various ways, religion—these are the places (for me) where loneliness
is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated. In lots of ways it’s all there is.