Why we're fated to be lonely
(but that's ok)
There are few more shameful confesions to make
than that we are lonely.
The basic assumption is that no respectable person
could ever feel isolated
unless maybe they just moved country
or been widowed.
Yet in truth a high degree of loneliness
is an inexorable part
of being a sensitive, intelligent human.
It's a built-in feature of a complex existence
there are several big reasons for this.
The reasons
Much of what we need recognized
and confirmed by others,
a lot of what would it be extremely comforting to share,
is going to be disturbing to society at large.
Many of the ideas in the recesses of our minds
are too odd, contrary, subtle, or alarming
to be safely revealed to anyone else.
We face a choice between honesty and acceptability
and understandibly
mostly choose the later.
It takes a lot of energy to listen to another person
and enter sympathetically into their experiences.
We shouldn't blame others for their failure to focus
on who we are,
they might want to meet us
but we should accept the energy
with which they would keep the topic of their own lives
at the center of the conversation.
We must all die alone
which really means that our pain
is for us alone to endure,
others can throw us words of encouragment
but in every life we are out on the ocean
drowning in the swell and others,
even the nice ones,
are standing on the shore waving cheerily.
It´s deeply unlikely that we will ever find someone
on exactly the same page of the soul as us.
We will long for utter congruety
but there will be constant dissonance
because we appeared on the earth at different times,
are the product of different families and experiences,
and are not just made of quite the same fabric.
So, they won´t be thinking just the same as us
on coming out of the cinema,
and looking out at the night sky;
just when we want them to say something high-flown and beautiful
they will, perhaps, be remembering a painfully banal
untimely detail from an area of domestic li fe,
or viceversa.
It is almost comic.
We will almost certainly never meet the people
best qualified to understand us
but they do exist.
Probably, they once walked pass us in the street
though neither of us had the slightest idea of the potential for connection.
Or maybe they died in Sydney two weeks ago
or wouldn´t be born until the 22nd century.
It isn't a conspiracy;
we would just have needed a lot more luck.
The problem is sure to get worse
the more thoughtful and perceptive we are.
There will simply be less people like us around.
It isn't a romantic myth;
loneliness truly is a kind of tax we have to pay
to atone for certain complexity of mind.
The desire to undress someone is, for a long time, far more urgent than the desire for good conversation.
And so, we end up locked in relationships with certain people we don't have much to say to
because we were once fatefully interested
in the shape of their nose
or the color of their remarkable eyes
And yet, despite all of this
we shouldn't be frightened or discomforted by a pervasive loneliness.
At an exasperated moment near the end of his life
the German writer Goethe, who appeared to have had a lot of friends exploded bitterly:
"No one has ever properly understood me,"
"I had never fully understood anyone."
"No one understands anyone else."
It was a helpful outburst from such a great man.
It isn't our fault;
a degree of distance and mutual incomprehension
it isn't a sign that life has gone wrong
it's what we should expect from the very start.
and when we do, benefits can follow.
Once we accept loneliness we can get creative:
we can start to send out messages in a bottle, we can sing, write poetry, produce books and blogs;
activities stemming from the realization that people around us wont ever fully get us,
but that others, separated across time and space, might just.
The history of art is the record of people
who couldn't find anyone in the vicinity to talk to
and we can take up the coded offer of intimacy in say:
the words of a Roman poet who died in 10 B.C.,
or the lyrics of a singer who described just our blues in a recording from Nashville in 1963.
Loneliness makes us more capable of true intimacy
if ever better opportunities do come along;
it heightens the conversation we have with ourselves;
it give us a character.
We don't repeat what everyone else thinks;
we develop a point of view;
we might be isolated for now
but we'll be capable of far closer more interesting bonds
with anyone we do eventually locate.
Loneliness renders us elegant and strangely alluring;
it suggests there's more about us to understand
than the normal patterns of social intercourse can accommodate,
which is something we can take pride in.
A sense of isolation truly i, as we suspect but usually prevent ourselves from feeling from fear of arrogance,
a sign of depth.
When we admit our loneliness,
we are signing up to a club that includes the people we know from the paints of Edward Hooper,
the poems of Baudelaire, and the songs of Leonard Cohen.
Lonely, we enter we enter a long and grand tradition:
we find ourselves surprisingly in great company.
Enduring loneliness is almost invariably better
than suffering the compromises of false community.
Loneliness is simply a price we may have to pay
for holding onto a sincere, ambitious view of what companionship must and could be.