A few months ago my wife and our little daughter took off for two weeks, leaving me alone to myself in New Haven, CT. I have felt lonely before - it was not the first time. But this time it was especially lonely to me. I found myself wondering:
But now you might say: who are you to think you might know anything about loneliness, son? And you are right to think that. I married very young and basically went from living with my parents, to living with my wife. I have never spent time alone before. However, for those who have never been married before or have never lived with a person before, I may ask: how do you know how it feels to be alone as a married man? A dog can naturally survive without living in water, but the fish will notice the dry air instantaneously and die. To understand how air "feels," must one not rather turn to the fish instead of the dog? And if this does not suffice, then let the doubter and inquirer simply take this post to be thoughts from a beginner.
Secondly, I believe it is false to think of loneliness in terms of "less company." The opposite. I live with more voices and more people in my head when I am alone, than when I am with someone else. Being alone makes my brothers stay over night with me; it takes me to my mother in the kitchen; and it takes me back to broken hearts of the past, I wish I could heal. Loneliness makes my mind wander to old friends and old foes. Paradoxically I find loneliness forces me to encounter and interact with "more" than "less." To return home alone, is to return to a party of welcome and unwelcome guests. Like Penelope, who waited for Odysseus to return, I have many unwelcome guests at home. This point is not merely a romantic one, or a metaphorical one. Heidegger stressed convincingly the power of the being-with-others. That is, the encounter one has with others. One is constantly in conversation with the ghosts of one's past. Loneliness, I find, is a great excuse for some old ghosts to come back. Loneliness is paradoxically not the state of solitude but rather a kind of emotional multitude.
Finally, I have realized that loneliness thrusts myself upon myself. I feel the weight of myself. I alone am the one to comprehend the ugliness of these New Haven streets. I alone am the one who must carry the full weight of movies watched and poetry read. Sharing something with someone relieves me of its full content. The more people carry a stone, the less it weighs for the individual. The more people carry the semantic weight of the world, the less it weighs for the individual. If I have no contact with someone with whom I can share the semantic weight, it all falls on myself. I alone am the one who must cash in the checks of the experiences I make, without any stipend or financial help. This all also means that I feel myself too much. I become aware of myself. I cannot dive under or disappear in the crowd. I am the only who can laugh when I watch a movie, and every chuckle that echoes in the emptiness of the surrounding walls makes me aware of my body in the room. I cannot flee from myself.
This, in a nutshell, is how I experience loneliness. I become a destabilized, oscillated self. I find myself visiting old ghosts in the valleys of old, without any real restriction. And finally, I become aware of myself as myself. Loneliness, while it casts its shadow over me, at the same time brings myself to light. Loneliness is a mirror in a world where I am constantly at pains to become invisible.
Allow me to close with Shakespeare, without any further comment. In an amazingly beautiful scene, in his otherwise rather weak King John, we find a young prince being introduced to a young woman in order to make political peace with their possible marriage. "What sayst thou, boy?" King Philip asks his son Lewis. "Look in the lady's face."
What is this "loneliness" I feel? How is it to be described? How to be named? I must wrestle with it to understand it even if I might not be able to conquer it.
Enough. Let us now turn to our task. What is loneliness? What processes are involved? What structures?First, I would like to suggest that my self becomes unstable. I am no longer stabilized by another being, a different reflecting and establishing self. I can be many more selves than I usually am. when I am alone. There is no force by which I am any longer contained. I can become the self I do not want to be, without fearing retaliation or responsibility. "All the world's a stage," yes, Shakespeare. And in an empty theater, I can play all the roles I want. My self is not stabilized by anything that balances and reflects. The other determines and focuses the possibilities I have to chose. This focusing other, my "second better half," can be harmful, if you are with the wrong person. But it can be immensely liberating in its deliberation and encouraging in its purging if you are with the right person. Being lonely for me is being existentially destabilized. With all of the selves I wake up with in the morning, it is hard to find the self I generally enjoy being. I can get confused and disoriented. When I am lonely, the person staring back at me, while I shave, contains multitudes. Being lonely makes me oscillate.
Secondly, I believe it is false to think of loneliness in terms of "less company." The opposite. I live with more voices and more people in my head when I am alone, than when I am with someone else. Being alone makes my brothers stay over night with me; it takes me to my mother in the kitchen; and it takes me back to broken hearts of the past, I wish I could heal. Loneliness makes my mind wander to old friends and old foes. Paradoxically I find loneliness forces me to encounter and interact with "more" than "less." To return home alone, is to return to a party of welcome and unwelcome guests. Like Penelope, who waited for Odysseus to return, I have many unwelcome guests at home. This point is not merely a romantic one, or a metaphorical one. Heidegger stressed convincingly the power of the being-with-others. That is, the encounter one has with others. One is constantly in conversation with the ghosts of one's past. Loneliness, I find, is a great excuse for some old ghosts to come back. Loneliness is paradoxically not the state of solitude but rather a kind of emotional multitude.
Finally, I have realized that loneliness thrusts myself upon myself. I feel the weight of myself. I alone am the one to comprehend the ugliness of these New Haven streets. I alone am the one who must carry the full weight of movies watched and poetry read. Sharing something with someone relieves me of its full content. The more people carry a stone, the less it weighs for the individual. The more people carry the semantic weight of the world, the less it weighs for the individual. If I have no contact with someone with whom I can share the semantic weight, it all falls on myself. I alone am the one who must cash in the checks of the experiences I make, without any stipend or financial help. This all also means that I feel myself too much. I become aware of myself. I cannot dive under or disappear in the crowd. I am the only who can laugh when I watch a movie, and every chuckle that echoes in the emptiness of the surrounding walls makes me aware of my body in the room. I cannot flee from myself.
This, in a nutshell, is how I experience loneliness. I become a destabilized, oscillated self. I find myself visiting old ghosts in the valleys of old, without any real restriction. And finally, I become aware of myself as myself. Loneliness, while it casts its shadow over me, at the same time brings myself to light. Loneliness is a mirror in a world where I am constantly at pains to become invisible.
Allow me to close with Shakespeare, without any further comment. In an amazingly beautiful scene, in his otherwise rather weak King John, we find a young prince being introduced to a young woman in order to make political peace with their possible marriage. "What sayst thou, boy?" King Philip asks his son Lewis. "Look in the lady's face."
"I do, my lord; and in her eye I find
A wonder, or a wondrous miracle,
The shadow of myself form'd in her eye:
Which being but the shadow of your son,
Becomes a sun and makes your son a shadow:
I do protest I never loved myself
Till now infixed I beheld myself
Drawn in the flattering table of her eye."
(Shakespeare, King John, II, 1, 497-503)
1 comment:
To consider loneliness in terms of Dasein's Being-with, or Dasein-with (that our self is not something present-at-hand separated from other human being)sheds light on the phenomenon of loneliness: that loneliness can only be possible in our relationship with the other, the They; that the absence of certain concrete relations just pushes us to seek other, more varied attachment, visiting old ones, fancying new ones.
As a person who never had any relationship longer than a few months, loneliness has different significance. Loneliness is, to me,not so much the failure to be together with others, but rather the failure to even imagine the attachment with certain persons that I'm fond of, the failure to secure a sense of being in relation to others. The power of the other to level down my possiblities of being lies in that even in order to imagine a defining attachment, I need to conform my way of being to the They, as any particular other always to different degree an embodiment of the They.
The other kind of loneliness to consider is Wordsworth's solitude, alone with nature. That is a radical readjustment of the self's relationship with others. Consider his spots of time, most of them being alone with nature, and how they saved him from his worldly involvement.
Post a Comment