LONELINESS
ART and ORGANISM
LONELINESS
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They’re sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it’s better than drinking alone.
(Billy Joel, “Piano Man“, Piano Man (1973).
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To Know and To be Known
are two hugely affecting needs … the first sign of their being unmet is loneliness
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Loneliness may be one of the most poignant and powerful and paradoxical of emotions–it strikes at the existential heart of one’s humanity and the realization of our essential selves.
Loneliness is paradoxical because it represents an imbalance in the normally balanced processes of individuation and socialization, We are highly motivated to pursue these processes–biological needs–which together play distinctive but indispensable parts in human development.
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. (Aldous Huxley, Doors of Perception)
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Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.
(Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections (1963), p.356.)
(is it that we seek corroboration? –one of our principal modes of reality-testing)
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In her 2023 essay on Paul Simon in The New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich wrote that Simon’s recent record, “Seven Psalms”, “made me think of the Trappist monk, poet, and mystic Thomas Merton, who wrote often about the loneliness of our path to comprehending the sublime. “Although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling,” he observed. Merton also believed that it was possible to see God everywhere. “We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through it all the time,” he said, in 1965. Merton was a Catholic, but he seems to be saying that God—whatever, whoever that might mean—will always appear to a person who is looking. In fact, Merton was sure of it: “This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true.”
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Connecting to
SOCIALITY and Loneliness connects to other A&O notes:
- DEVELOPMENT
- INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION;
- KNOW THYSELF:
- SELF in the CLASSROOM
- BIOLOGICAL NEEDS
- COGNITION and the THEORY of MIND – is loneliness at the heart of existential angst?
- A&O post on Loneliness
- AO-needs-sociality-and-physiology-loneliness/
- READING – about loneliness as a social construct (from “The BIOGRAPHY of LONELINESS,” reviewed in The New Yorker (2020) – HERE)
