A solitary like me, unused to speaking of what I see and feel, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others bush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy me more than their due; they sink silently on, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in me, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry, But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
I simply cannot find within myself the ability to bear the proximity of another person on a regular basis. I cannot bear the physical closeness, to respond to the expectations of another human being.
The attitude goes further than my self-absorption; it goes profoundly into a distaste for other people, whether friends, relatives, or a potential wife. In some remote area I cannot completely comprehend, I fear the disorder an emotional and physical life entails. I am terrified of chaos, something I cannot control from my writing desk.
Perhaps the condition I recommend is virtually catatonic: Perhaps the best resource if some slip stops the entire process is to meet everything passively, to make myself an inert mass, and, if I feel that I am being carried away, not to let myself be lured and taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with my own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in me, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyards and let nothing survive save that.
2 comments:
I believe that is an absurd loneliness, because the loneliness are only in your mind, like your freedom.
Above all, you are an incredibly talented word-artist, a skill I envy. I find it intriguing that you recognize that your perhaps self-imposed solitude gives birth to your originality, your beauty and your poetry, as well as the birth of the opposite (indeed, can anything exist without creating it's own void?). Yet you only allow yourself the singular option of loneliness at a social level, knowing an alternative at least exists. I fight much the same battles, I realize, but perhaps not as intensely as you do. By creating my loneliness I'm both reinforcing it perpetually, and thereby reinforcing its own void, that of social contact. Why are you comfortable wearing one skin, but not the other? Social contact, in spite of advertiser's hookum, does not mean sexual intercourse, not even intimacy. A handshake and a coffee is worthy of the investment.
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