David B. Calhoun’s Blog

Took a walk to the park today to meditate a bit.. here’s some stuff I wrote:

I can’t help but feel that when people speak of loneliness, they actually mean something else, something more abstract. It is like this: just last week I was talking with my friends and the subject of sex came up. Sex is fun and pleasurable, and one of my friends was trying to get me to chime in and agree. “Yes,” I said, “but there is something more.. something more abstract”.

I was thinking of people who live their lives to have sex. What an awfully simple fate to get stuck with sex for sex’s sake! And it’s scary to think that most people would like this sort of lifestyle if they could support themselves and if there were no consequences. But no - sex in itself is nothing. Like many pleasures, it points beyond itself, to some deep urge for the abstract - for pleasure itself, in its pure form? And it’s no wonder people mistake sex for abstract pleasure - for sex is the closest they will get to the abstract.

Enough of this digression - back to loneliness. When people say they’re lonely, I feel they are really aiming at something more abstract, deeper and beyond. THis is what I mean: there is a difference in the loneliness one feels in being apart from their family for a week or so and the loneliness one feels in not having a family at all. And I don’t think it’s a temporal difference (i.e. saying that they are different because one example has the person separated from their family by a week and the other example has the person separated from their family for a long indefinite period of time).

The difference is that in the one example the person means something to other people, and those people mean something to that person. In the case of the person with no family, there is no one to mean something to. There is no exchange of value of their existence. They are an island - no ships come or leave their harbor.

This is quite different from loneliness - the feeling of meaninglessness - but loneliness is one of its causes. A person is brought up in the world and perhaps questions a few things (i.e. in school, children ask “why are we learning this?”, “how can we use this?”, “what’s the point in learning this?”). And suppose later they reject their friends, they’re unsuccessful with love (or perhaps unrepairably broken-hearted), they have forsaken their family (or their family has forsaken them), and are now living alone. What horror if we have to question the point of their existence!: “what’s the point in you being here?”, “how can you be useful to the world?”, “why are you existing at all?”.

This is the real anguish of the lonely person - it’s an existential anguish. This is how it’s possible to walk down streets of crowded strangers and perhaps feel the deepest loneliness: the fact that so many faces are passing you by, but all are meaningless to you, and you are equally meaningless to them. Or - perhaps the small meaning you have to them consists in the fact that you’re in their way. This is beyond unnerving…