/lit/ - Literature

>>23379125
Sometimes the loneliness follows you even when you're surrounded by people, even when you're with people you love.

>>23379125
Most people are lonely, especially those in a marriage

>>23379125
bump

>>23379125
It’s good to be alone. It’s good to shut the door behind one and not be with other people for a while. It hasn’t always been like this. In childhood being alone was a defect or a failing, often painful. If you were alone it was because no one wanted to be with you... The absence of others was unequivocally negative.

And yet I never asked myself how this applied to my father, who spent so much time alone. He was a supreme being, everything about him was as it should be, it never occurred to me that his solitude too could be a defect or a flaw, something painful. He had no friends, only colleagues, and he spent most evenings alone in the basement, where he listened to music or worked on his stamp collection. He shunned social intimacy, he never sat on a bus, he was never one of the parents who drove to football matches with a carload of kids. At the time I didn’t notice this. Not until he died and we found his diary was I able to see his life in that light. Loneliness concerned him, he had thought about it a great deal.

“I have always been able to recognise the lonely,” he wrote in his diary. “They don’t walk the same way as other people. It is as if they don’t carry any joy, any spark within themselves, whether they are women or men.”

In another entry he wrote, “I am looking for a word for the opposite of loneliness. I would like to find a different word to love, which is far too overworked and inadequate. Tenderness, peace of mind and soul, togetherness?” Togetherness was a good word for it. It is the opposite of loneliness. Why he never felt it I don’t know. It is one of the good feelings in life, perhaps the best. And yet I often do as he did, close the door behind me to be alone. I know why I do it, it’s good to be alone, for a few hours to be exempt from all the complicated bonds, all the conflicts, great and small, all the demands and expectations, wills and desires that build up between people, and which after only a short time become so densely intertwined that the room for reflection and for action are both restricted. If everything that stirs between people made a sound, it would be like a chorus, a great murmur of voices would rise from even the faintest glimmer in the eyes. Surely he too must have felt this? Perhaps more powerfully than I do? For he started drinking, and drinking muffles this chorus and makes it possible to be with other people without hearing it. Yes, that must be it. For the sentence he ended that diary entry with, I could never have written. He wrote, “In brief, what I have just now so clumsily tried to express is that I have always been a lonely man.” Or, the thought strikes me now with horror, maybe it was the other way round? Maybe he simply didn’t hear this chorus, didn’t know it existed and therefore didn’t become bound by it, but remained forever standing on the outside, observing how all the others were bound by something he didn’t understand?

>>23379125
Sauce?

>>23379125
Aside from any anomalous mental cognition, or sense making, if only

>>23379140
>>23379137
>>23379125
god, you're all so fucking gay.

>>23380049
He fucked a woman and had children so he's a normalfag

It's me. I'm lonely.

>>23381423
me 2

i hate life

>>23379125
>"‘I have always been able to recognise the lonely,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They don’t walk the same way as other people
Did he ask them? I don't think so. Therefore he didn't know that they were lonely. He came up with this shit just to write it down and people will gobble it up because you want to believe it

Alone, but not lonely.
I hate people so fucking much, words fail me.

Solitude forces accession of cadence, predisposing toward art & science; uncorrected loneliness succumbs to decadence, predisposing toward antiart & antiscience.

>>23379125
I hate people that project so hard. I'm alone but certainly not depressed like this dude.