Months, I have been alone. Years really. Perhaps most of a lifetime.
Lonely. Sometimes. Now, for the first time in weeks. And why? Because I cannot stay alone.
One of my friends said, 'I want to see my friends! In person! Not on a screen! I want to sit on the sofa together and have tea!' I couldn't really tap into that. I do not feel a drive toward physical presence. I understand the mammalian comfort of touch, of the warmth of another body, skin against skin, the pulse beating, the heart drumming. I understand that. But I would not have that level of intimacy with a friend sitting on the sofa drinking tea. So what does that proximity provide that online conversation does not? Just to know that someone is there? I suppose there is some solace in that and yet this friend has a teenager in the house. Someone is there. So it's more than that which she seeks.
Conversation with a present person can be more diffuse, more intuitive too as you sense the other body's mood on perhaps another level beyond the mere reading of body language on a screen. Which assumes a great receptivity on the part of the listener, the reader, the watcher and feeler. I do not think that one experiences such sensitivity often outside a therapist's room. People present physically are often absent psychologically, staring into space or a screen as much as they are focusing on the person they are with, don't you find?
So what do we want by being with people rather than speaking with them? I must be obtuse: I do not know.
I was, effectively, an only child. I was not, in my many and varied different schools, a popular child. I did not grow up in a brood. I did not gather in gangs and groups. I have always been on the outside looking in.
What do you see when you look in? A sense of belonging. Confidence, perhaps. Competition too. An ease in togetherness. A taking of each other for granted. Loose bonds like gossamer threads binding the group together. There's a distance beyond which a member cannot go - psychologically even more than physically - before the thread tightens and they are drawn back or the bond breaks. And then the solitary soul, I imagine, must feel alone - missing the constant contact which made her part of a greater whole.
In one of John Donne's poems, 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning', he addresses the parting of two lovers. The speaker says that the lovers will not feel the grief of separation as 'dull sublunary lovers' do because their love is based not on lips and hands and bodies, but on the connection of their souls. There is a beautiful image of a pair of twin compasses, joined at the top, yet with the feet a wide distance apart. The bond is not physical, but spiritual.
For me, as I explained in yesterday's post, I fear the absence of myself. I fear that my rediscovered passion for ideas will be lost in the world of action. I feel as though time for my mind, rather than the physical body of the other, is the sine qua non of completion and comfort. Perhaps I am being too 'sublunary' about this. If I can refine that sense of connection from the temporal to the eternal, maybe I can feel the presence of thinking in its absence.
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