You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone, yet it seems to me you are more alone while living than even going and coming.
An afterthought:
Loneliness is something we don't talk about because of the shame associated with it. It's hard to talk about and often, if you're lonely, you have no one to talk to about it in the first place. I spent a good two hours looking for art, images, music, and literature about loneliness and, sadly, I knew more about it than google seemed to. The ATAT (the Imperial Walker from Star Wars, for the uninitiated) scratching at the door, though, was a search engine score.
Why would I post this? Not a vote for sympathy (thanks anyway though), no; it's because I want to draw attention to the way popular culture deals with loneliness. Or rather, doesn't.
High culture (whatever that is) seems to talk about it with a little more veracity. Consider Ingmar Bergman, the man the New York Times called "the master filmmaker who found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition":
4 other voices:
Eleanor Rigby is one of my favourite books.
This is a very sad post.
Where are you?
I'm across the desk from you. What was that I was saying about being invisible?
i've just started a book called "party of one - the loner's manifesto" by anneli rufus. i bought it used along with a copy of the bell jar. the cashier likely thought i was headed home to put my head in the toaster oven.
but i think we need to be lonely sometimes. and i think some people get lonely too easily, and are with people at all times, at any cost. the way some people can't stand silence - being alone means paying attention to what is (or maybe more often isn't) going on on the inside.
loneliness: use it.
I like it, Pip.
lonlieness as a tool of self-(de)construction.
company as coping strategy; or,
company as codependence.
generalizations, sure, but I dig the upside of solitude.
If a thing is hard to do, it's generally worth doing.
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