The Plague of Isolation

I am in exile from humanity. No one visits me, and no one ever calls. It is undoubtedly the feeling of exile--that sensation of a void which never leaves me, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that sting like fire. Sometimes I toy with my imagination, composing myself to wait for a ring at the front door bell announcing somebody's visit, or for the sound of the telephone ringing; but, though I might deliberately stay at home at the hour when somebody might call, and though I might contrive to forget for the moment that no one ever calls, that game of make-believe, for obvious reasons, cannot last.




Always a moment comes when I have to face the fact that no one is coming. And then I realize that my separation from other people is destined to continue, I have no choice but to come to terms with the days, the months, and the years ahead. In short, I return to my mental prison, I have nothing left but the past, and even if I am tempted to live in the future, I have speedily to abandon the idea--anyhow, as soon as can be--once I feel the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it.

And thus there is always something missing in my life. Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and cheated of the future, I am much like those whom men's justice, or hatred, forces to live behind prison bars. Thus the only way of escaping from that intolerable leisure is to set the telephone ringing in my imagination and in filling the silence with the fancied tinkle of the doorbell, in practice obstinately mute.