“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”
Sir Francis Bacon
How is it that one can be utterly alone in a busy, dense crowd? I’ll never understand how feelings of isolation and alienation can both thrive in the middle of what seems to be their antithesis. It’s like weed in the flower bed. It shouldn’t be possible, and yet there it is.
Sometimes, I fear that life is mere coping with lonliness. Sure, there are nations of citizens, organizations of employees, communities of familes, teams of athletes, and circles of friends — all fractal examples of plurality. Yet, how do we still manage to feel alone in crowded rooms?
I think these packs of people that we constantly assemble about us, whether in the tens or tens of thousands, are attempts to deny the inevitable: that we will one day die alone. Just as surely as we entered the world alone, we leave it the same.
I sincerely hope that I am terribly wrong.
A very dear friend told me recently that our lives should be defined by our faith in the larger order of things. I.e., all good things to those who wait. I suppose the only way in which I can exercise such faith in the superorganism is to go out and invest myself in others, in order to find myself.
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