What was will never be again

I dreaded being spurned and refused to take the plunge. After I mucked things up royally, I realized that it was indeed love. Years later, she lingers; ours a still-born love.

Love, as I have been told, is equal parts hatred and affection, devoid of indifference. I loved her. I really did. I still do, to an extent. But appropriately, I loathe her absence. I despise her lips, those lips I still yearn to kiss. I despise her voice, an angelic voice that melted inhabitions, because it is merely a recollection, no longer immediate, no longer a repetition, no longer a reality. I despise her laugh and her orgiastic cries, lost to me and belonging to another. Vertigo and paralysis is all one can feel when imagining his beloved in the bed of another. I hate that recurring nightmare. I hate that faceless romantic rival. I leave him without face, holding out hope that it could still be my face. I loathe myself most of all, for squandering that time with her. I hate that I still love her.

A feeling of utter incompleteness is terribly unbearable. As I hiked a trail the other day, I remembered her being there, some time ago. When I camped out, all by my lonesome, she was there in my thoughts. And as I sat on the rocks looking at the setting sun, I wished she was there to share it. Incomplete. I am incomplete without her. It's futile though. What can I do? I hate this feeling of helplessness.

Is she my soulmate? Who knows. But I suspect there is no such thing. But I miss her all the same. I don't remember her as an object of my affection. I remember her as my partner, forever lost to me. I loved her and always will. I wish I had grown up in time to tell her.

Feist - Let It Die

Let It Die - Feist

Let it die and get out of my mind
We don't see eye to eye
Or hear ear to ear

Don't you wish that we could forget that kiss
And see this for what it is
That we're not in love

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

It was hard to tell just how I felt
To not recognize myself
I started to fade away

And after all it won't take long to fall in love
Now I know what I don't want
I learned that with you

The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start
The tragedy starts from the very first spark
Losing your mind for the sake of your heart
The saddest part of a broken heart
Isn't the ending so much as the start

The romanticism that stirs within

Economy of language demands strict precision. No word or punctuation will be employed without purpose. This is how I was taught to write in ESL. As time passed, disenchantment emerged. Why should I contort my thoughts to fit such rules? And in adolescence, composition was infected with romanticism. Even Baudelaire would wretch at the prose produced by a decadent youth. They were empty expressions of unrequited passion, groping for an object of "affection". This Affection concealed wretched narcissism. The object of affection summoned base desires, obsessed with perception. Alas, surfaces do betray its facility, and in doing so, wounds the inner romantic. Without the sensation of beauty, what can I have? The grotesque pulled him into the abyss. Beauty was lost, forever? One is never free from self-grandeur. It stirs within. The drama concocted within the self distracts, bemuses, and entertains the bored individual.

Never were and forever

Darling, while you're chilling in Paris, I'm stuck nowhere, thinking vast thoughts slowed by minutia. But darling, don't you see? You keep me alive. My heart races to the vision of you, with naked or mind's eye. Beyond appearance, beyond sentiment or crude arousal, you are a wonder. At the edge of an abyss, you keep me from going over and slipping aimlessly into despair. May we share an encounter that never will be, lost forever in that misty dreamscape; a dream that sustains us nonetheless...until the next. Goodbye, hello...reality/dream...me and you, never were and forever.

The demonic fruit

- Are you ready?

Yeah, I am.

- Have you prepared a few words for us?

Nope, but I’m ready.

- Well, the stage is yours.

Thank you.

I am here, but not for long. I have much to say, but will tell you nothing at all. I will tell you what you want to hear, feed your illusions, and affirm your preconceptions. I will stroke your egos and add to their massive largesse. But I will tell you nothing at all – nothing that you don’t already know. When life becomes futile and passionless, nothing is all that I can tell you. A loveless existence is interminable. Honestly, I have nothing to tell you really.

But this is my time. This is my stage. This is my opportunity to peddle trite facility as truth - to a group that sees through my duplicity. Here I stand here today not a good man or a bad man, whatever good and bad means. So what do you want to know?

- What’s your favorite food?

Why?

- Because that question that tells a lot about a person.

Oh really? Well all right.

I really liked hot dogs.

- That’s not food.

What do you mean?

- It’s not a type of food.

Well what the bloody hell have I been shoving down my gullet all those years?

- We cannot disclose that, but we can safely assure you that hot dogs are not food.

Okay, I don’t want to know.

- Was there any other food that you had a special affinity for?

Yeah, I enjoyed bananas.

- The demonic fruit?

The what what?

The demonic fruit!

I don’t understand how bananas are demonic. I mean they were tasty and a versatile fruit.

You can eat them, fry them, make banana splits and blend them into smoothies and shakes.

- Yes, all of that is true, but that does not make them any less demonic.

Okay, I love the demonic fruit then, next?

- Please don’t address us with that tone.

Hey, is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

- We are the ones posing the questions, not you.

I thought this could be a dialogue, an exchange of information and all that.

- We know all.

Good, so fruit or vegetable?

- A tomato is a tomato.

That’s some profound shit.

- Please refrain from using that language.

You know all, right?

- Yes.

So don’t prude up like you never knew about that little word.

- Please change your tone of voice.

All right, I suppose I’m disclosing too much, go on…what else do you want to know?

- What is love?

Okay, so we go from hot dogs to bananas to tomatoes to love? I have eaten the first three, but the last one ate me.

Prada spontaneity

She glanced at him. There was no doubt about it. She turned to walk away, but he spotted her. In a crowded Granville Island marketplace, they would meet for the first time in ten years. She courteously turned around to greet him, hoping to keep the encounter as short as possible, because she still had shopping to do.

”Hey, it’s been a long time,” he initiated. She looked at him intently, trying to see who this really was and replied with a nervous chuckle.

“Yeah it has.” She stared at her shoes, as she had often done in order to short circuit conversation. But as she grew absorbed with her footwear, her mind wandered. Groceries, clothes, bookstore, shower, nightlife…but this wasn’t part of her Saturday. They stood there for while. She wanted him to say, “So nice to see you again” and shuffle off. It never happened when she looked up. He was still there.

“I know that you probably want to get on with your usual Saturday. But usual is the usual, ya know? How about accompanying an old acquaintance for the day?”

She was taken aback by his candor. In spite of the abruptness of the encounter, she was intrigued by the proposal.

“And I’ll treat you to dinner. I mean its something long overdue.” To which she replied in cliché.

“So are you asking me out…on a date?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. I mean we barely know each other now. I just didn’t want to wander the streets of Vancouver all by my lonesome,” he said with sedate joviality. She started to be swayed by his proposal, but still stood there silently, devising a response appropriate for the moment. When such a response was not forthcoming, he intervened again.

“You look like you’re on a schedule,” he said looking at her grocery list. “How about this? I’ll tag along with you for the morning as you go through that list. And if you aren’t tired of me after that, we can go on from there.” The slightest of smiles appeared on her face. She was amused that he was now a willing participant in her shopping escapades.

“That sounds like plan,” as she restarted her walk through the market. “And please try to keep up.” A playful haughtiness fused with her steps, as her Saturday routine was pleasantly disturbed.

---

Elevation

Above the valleys, over rills and meres,
Above the mountains, woods, the oceans, clouds,
Beyond the sun, past all etheral bounds,
Beyond the borders of the starry spheres,

My agile spirit, how you take your flight!
Like a strong swimmer swooning on the sea
You gaily plough the vast immensity
With manly, inexpressible delight.

Fly above this morbid, vaporous place;
Go cleanse yourself in higher, finer air,
And drink up, like a pure, divine liqueur,
Bright fire, out of clear and limpid space.

Beyond ennui, past troubles and ordeals
That load our dim existence with their weight,
Happy the strong-winged man, who makes the great
Leap upward to the bright and peaceful fields!

The man whose thoughts, the larks, take to their wing
Each morning, freely speeding through the air,
- Who soars above this life, interpreter
Of flowers' speech, the voice of silent things!

- Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du Mal, 3

The dandy

A desire for the end, simple release from mortality, informs nihilism. What must I do in order to fulfill my essence, my fate? This question torments the nihilist. He does not believe in nothing. He is the prototypical liberal taken to logical limits. Cutesy, nouveau ways of presentation, the task of aesthetical sensibility makes claims to supremacy over all other matters. A romantic is simply a nihilist existing in a state of abysmal denial. For the dandy, it is how he appears that trumps all.

As he walks through town with his notebook in tow and his cape draped elegantly over his shoulders, his face betrays the disdain he harbours for those who fail to understand him - he, the master-artist, the master-philosopher, the beautiful mind, wasted amongst the degenerate mass. Purity is exclusively his domain, and only he can hope to attain it. He walks glumly through the village, still yearning for purer times, for better times. Alas, as his sojourn nears its conclusion, he encounters the local drunkard, appearing as slovenly as ever, who asks for a pence to buy a drink. The dandy shoots him a cold stare, turning his cape in an equally dismissive manner, and marches onward for home. Upon returning to his studio, he draws a bath, strips off his garments, opens his veins, and waits for purity, because life is not where genuine being resides for the dandy.

There is the life-as-expected, the long journey to the middle, a search for the serenity-as-artifice, for the banal and the safe. This is life as a road map – meticulously planned in a general way. Here are the milestones, hit them on your way to the middle. The dandy can't lower himself to the petit bourgeois. It is repugnant to his 'nobler' sensibilities; the rabble rabble is below him.

The life unexpected comes to being through spontaneity. It is a life open to surprise, receptive of contingency. It breaks through the crust of repetition, refusing the teleology of rigid expectations and well-made plans. Life is wonder, bewilderment; it is not expressible simply in words or doctrine nor simply feelings and perceptions. What life is cannot be encapsulated in descriptions or speculations about what it should be, guaranteed. Life unfolds without knowledge of what is to come. The unknown is not an object the flaneur acquires, admires, critiques, and elevates by virtue of his general iridiscence. The dandy fears the unknown, even as the last drop of blood enters the bathwater. "Anywhere is better than here..." So begins the final entry in his notebook. He expires before finishing the thought.

The story begins and ends here...

“What if I were to tell you that I am still in love with you?”

“It doesn’t matter. It has been too long. We are different people. We will always be different people.”

The story begins and ends here, I suppose. What else can be said for love unrequited other than it is absurd. Yearning lingers in the heart of the romantic and can never be fully expiated. Contentions attesting to the contrary are patently duplicitous. He fully grasps the limits of romance, ecstasy and pain. It is at these most intense points where he imagines himself and his beloved. In his mind, he lives at the margins – imagines the blissful union, but remains in fear and trembling of the distance between. The romantic needs the pain of separation. For the union of lovers casts finitude upon individual psychic machinations. In encounter he must confront his other in actuality. The torment of alienation, that ineluctable distance between lovers, remains endless. The romantic needs perpetual yearning and hunger to satisfy his desire for the boundless.

Fixation

What is fixation? Fixation can be a stubborn, atavistic, romantic, and desperate hold onto a condition that never was -- and never will be. Fixation is that unyielding worship of a perfectible object, possible through a determined decision not to confront an existent human condition. Fixation yearns for confirmation and meaning. It desperately wants to believe that cosmic unity manifests itself at single percievable point - represented by an old man in the sky, a pair of supple breasts, the pure green of virgin pastures, or a lost garden blessed by blissful ignorance. But cosmic unity, if such a phenomena is at all possible, cannot be perceived, possessed, or grasped by a single One. Unity is lived in life between us and the world -- it requires a bold and courageous move into unknown horizons, not simply passing into contemplative purity. When fixated upon the idol, the object of affection and reverence, one is blinded to lived truth. The dream inspires but satisfies only individual delusion. Dreams are actualized, however imperfectly, in the life between human beings -- driving human becoming rather than fixating on Being. For no eternal form can satisfy the need for human becoming, since becoming is a transformative address of a world in flux. Fixation is a beautiful wax figure, that will be nothing more than what it appears. It cannot move. It cannot challenge facile judgments. It only reaffirms false perception and prejudice.

Medical History

A thirty year old man visits his doctor for the first time in a decade. The doctor opens up his file and notes that the patient has never undergone a physical. He asks the patient why this is the case. The patient simply informs the doctor that he is a nihilist and believes in nothing. The doctor tells him that he cannot in good conscience continue to be his physician, citing the lack of a medical history. The man gets up, drops his pants, and reveals the remanants of a castrated penis.

"No colds, no flus, didn't drink, didn't smoke, regular exercise, semi-regular sex, but my ex-girlfriend gnawed off my penis."

"Oh," the puzzled doctor replied. "Did she wear braces?"

"Why no."

Darling

Darling, my love, I have travelled countless miles on this earth and in my imagination, but there you are, just as you were, painfully lovely and forever elusive.

Darling, I have moved heaven and earth to separate from you, to forget us. I can't. Here I am, just as I was, tragically infatuated with impossible you. Impossible you, my darling, I cannot fathom to be away from you.

Darling, I wonder, I wander, I meander back to you, impossible you. Still, even now, I hear your laugh. Still, even now, I feel your touch, I sense your bashful and elegant body pressed close to mine. Still, right now, my world has no vibrance without you, my darling.

Darling, I wonder, I do wonder, how you are, how things could be, how things should have been between you and me. I love you and that I cannot deny. Your warmth, your dreamy exuberance, your passionate lips, your ebullience, our ebullience, our joy, our passion; but now, there's only pain, pain forevermore. Every moment absent of you destroys me ever so slowly; it accelerates my degeneration, cuffs me to regression, and whittles away my soulless atrophied existence.

Darling, you hurt me so, you left me shattered, you left me groping for impossible hope. How can I go, my love, without you? How can I go on without you my darling?

Darling, darling, I love you so.. I await your impossible return and I know I shall come to grief.

Closure?

She laid there, as if daring me to do what that I knew I shouldn’t. I wanted to succumb so badly. She bit her lip in an irresistibly flirtatious way, as I made a half-hearted grasp at composure. Off came one strap, then the other, and she started to shimmy out of her dress. She knew full well that my inhibitions had been shattered, and that she was in full control. She smiled. It was a command more than a smile. I went over. It was too much for me to bear.

As we laid in an intimate, expended embrace, she whispered those things I had longed to hear. When morning broke, the whispers were forgotten. I looked over and, as always, she was gone. And as expected, the note was there: “Thanks. Love, T”. She had to get to the church for preparations; her groom was waiting.

I drove past the church and stopped across from the street. I contemplated it. I really did. I walked up to the steps and back to my car. I stared at the cathedral, still contemplating it. Then the passenger door opens. I swiveled my head around to see who it was. All I could only make out was a blur of white. Of course, it was her climbing in. Off came one strap then the other…and it ends.

The fantasy-nightmare never holds the same details, but it unfolds in a familiar way. It ends as quickly as it begins, because dreams reject the constraints that govern conscious life. They are liberating and debilitating; feeling eternity in an instant is to have nothingness and totality meld into the other. After waking up from it, an anxious arousal surges through my body. It is only in the shower, after I have assuaged the need, do I experience serenity. As I stood in the shower with water pouring over my head, I realized the utter absurdity of it, the absurd idea of her. And it was then, pleasuring myself to a familiar fantasy, did I realize that the dream was liberating once I accepted its absurdity - the impossibility of a girl whom I never encountered but seemingly understood so intimately. Following the climax of a morning shower, I would think no more about it...until her inevitable return.

Failure of the Romantic

"Sometimes I feel that I have failed everyone who loves me. I have let complacency rather than dogged determination define my life. When I look back at the quarter of a century that I have spent on this planet, I see nothing but failure – potential unfulfilled. The runner who constantly looks over at his fellow competitors quickly finds himself lagging behind. I measure and compare myself to those around me, all the while layering mask upon mask, until I do not know who I really am. Although I put up a brave front, the fear of relegation is truly a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a teenager, I experienced the deepest scar – genuine heartbreak. The heartbreak was the product of timidity more so than of bold arrogance. It was a massive blow upon my budding masculinity. Rather than growing up, I was stunted. I found the stereotypes far too easy to abandon. An arrogant, brash, and consciously negligent visage desperately concealed a profound disillusionment with the world and with human relationships in general. I could not trust myself, much less in others. Friendships were strained. My ego grew seemingly larger, while truthfully my self-esteem neared annihilation.

Emptiness was all that I felt. I could not see beyond a moment in the past, and a penchant for superficiality emerged. Things, things, and more things are what I turned to in order to fill a void that seemed boundless. I could not see an end to the pain – apart from the auto-destruct button. Where would I go? It all seemed to have passed me by. Once, I sat alone in the playground, reminiscencing about the lovely joyous excursions as a child. I was wiser back then, I thought, as that young boy swinging on the swing, without care or neuroses. He ran side by side with his peers without direction or telos; the joy was in the act itself. There was no concern for measuring sticks, no persistent fears about failure. But even childhood is romanticized beyond recognition; recollections are unreliable, the product of a melancholic mind. If better times were behind me, what could I look forward to?

Even now, as I type this meandering collection of pathetic recollections, I still think of what might have been. It has paralysed me. I have made bold manifestos in the past. “I will turn things around now!” are how they usually go. But the singular gesture, the monumental moment of epiphany burns out quickly once things ease back into the status quo. How to turn things around? I still do not know. I just know that I want to change. I just haven’t found out how."

Beachwood

The ocean waves pounded the sandy shores, a tranquil violence. The noises of my modern cocoon, the constant bombardment of the superficial, were forgotten for the moment. It had been too long since I could hear nature in her elemental spontaneity, calling out to me, her prodigal son. My feet felt the sediment shift to and fro, sensing the inimitable rush of the waves journeying to shore. Standing knee-deep in the ocean, its vastness freed me, if only momentarily, from my neuroses. From whence we came, we shall return. But the technical world - its networks of minutia, massive hollow dreams, and the deprived awareness of individualism – is controllable. It feeds a faux-sovereignty where the individual thinks he exercises control over nature. But these waves will, as they have before, sweep the illusory away, leaving the technical paradise desolate, exposing its facility. Modern man, that arrogant, capable, self-willing creature, presents problems only he can answer. The integral relationship with nature, as it is with humans, does not hinge on answers. Relationship requires thoughtful silence and response. An imbalanced fascination with material accumulation has detached knowledge from wisdom and body from spirit. The being of man, his animality, and his innate tie to the unknown and unforeseen is too often displaced in favour of the rational, knowable, and predictable. From whence we came, we shall return.

Soon I reached the end of the beach, and ostensibly the end of my sojourn. But before I reached the carefully placed concrete path leading back to my vehicle, I saw a formation of beach wood. It was an address to play, a call to exorcise my constrictions. After inspecting my surroundings, I noticed the very distant figure of an elderly couple and their dog, thus banishing the bashful fear of embarrassment. I looked anxiously at the beach wood logs laying precariously on top of each other. I readied my body and tried not to topple under the weight of my own self-consciousness. But regardless of caution, I slipped and toppled, crumbling into a pile of small wood chips. Although the fall stunned me momentarily, it didn’t inflict any deeper wounds. And almost by impulse, I looked for the mocking laughs of the playground. None were forthcoming. I smiled. I had to fall in order to believe that I could walk without the weight of all those things unnecessary to my being. I picked myself up, readied myself again, and navigated atop the beach wood. Sure, there still was anxiety in my steps, still cognizant of what abyss may lie below, but my steps were invigorated with an unfamiliar confidence – accepting the possibility of the fall. I hopped from log to log, never recalling my initial failing. Alas, it is always too easy to speak of freedom, to pontificate endlessly about liberty; but it is the simplest joys – the ability to tightrope along beach wood – that allows one to live free, to laugh at failure and, if for only an instant, to be something other than the unsure self of neurosis. Free is that timeless moment of exposure to the unknown.

February 29, 1980

February 29, 1980

“Restlessness cannot be quenched by the surge of coitus. Oh, it is a rush, and like any rush, it leaves one satisfied and deprived. Sex destroys love when it is mere ritual, done for the sake of custom or out of a sense of boredom on a Saturday night. Don Juan, oh great Don Juan, you pale to Lord Byron in the art of misery. Overcoming again and again, only to repeat and rinse. How must the nihilist live in order to destroy? The structure of passion leaves you chained, dependent on restless desires. The rituals, the pursuit, the preordained play of sensual forces lead to the act, to the release, to an end and a beginning. Fuck all you want – it’s a pastime, it’s for our amusement and distraction, insulation from the harshness of reality, from everything else beyond the self. Masturbation, may it prosper, for it is only an exploitation of oneself.”

Lonely...so lonely...

With the passing of time, you come to realize that loneliness is integral to life. It is not simply an abysmal silence that renders the individual valueless, dare I say useless. It is the potential of human existence at rest, in anticipation of encounter and genuine relationship. It is in encounter that life takes place. Solitude provides the opportunity for reflection and preparation, to provide the conditions for genuine meeting.

However, loneliness is a state of being that is often repressed and concealed. "I must not appear alone." Hold onto your spouse/partner/fuck-toy/suck-toy a little tighter. Show him or her or him-her off proudly, lest you appear...lonely. But, we are not a species who lives in perpetual togetherness. We require distance. And, for the sake of sanity, we need distance.

Then why do appearances matter? Because, as modern sensibility dictates, only appearance really matters. The sanctity of martial bliss - the 'blessed' idea of eternal union - is now an illusion. People often plunge into marriage, because it is expected. And conversely, divorce is as much of an inevitability, because even the breakdown of union is expected, in spite of matrimonal rites that make promises...forever. It is the normal progression of affairs for a society full of romantic dogmatists. But the same applies to the virile bachelor(ette), who subscribes to a doctrine of promiscuity. For them, truth exists between one's legs. And, of course, there are those who choose a life of utter solitude, who reject all relationships - apart from those with God and with self. For them, truth lies within the individual soul - achievable only in isolation.

Solitude alone is not life. A prioritization of solitude over and above encounter is, in many ways, passive anticipation of death, anticipation of forever? The truly aloof individual does not accentuate his or her isolation. It is what it is. "Here I stand, I can do no other," the rebel says, willing to accept what may come from his stand. The one attempting to appear aloof, however, strangely longs for the gaze, for the attention that being part of the "crowd" could never bring. Isolation augments the value the gaze will provide, once he or she breaks from solitude. This, of course, harkens back to a time when aristocrats remained above and beyond the rabble, the masses. Of course, the aristocrat is nothing without the jealous and sublimely resentful gaze of the peasant. The idea that the peasant secretly wants to butcher him surely arouses the aristocrat - it confirms his high place of status. The gaze, especially one produced within the artifices of simulation and dissimulation, confirms self-grandeur. Mutual encounter only debunks self-delusion, and is, for the vain and aloof, to be avoided at any cost. Solitude, to put it clumsily, can be the artifice of aristocratic sensibility. In this context, loneliness is not accepted as part of life. It is grasped as an instrument for inflating self-worth, a means to elevate oneself as a valuable - desirable and superior - object. Solitude can be simulated for the purposes of manipulation.

Loneliness, in general, is feared. To be more precise, the perception of loneliness is feared. We are alone at times, but it is often difficult to confront alienation. The valorization of aloofness is indicative of aristocratic distance, a sentiment that claims that the lonely thinker is the ignored prophet, the voice salvation left without an audience. "No one understands," the lonely thinker concedes. It is an easy trap to fall into, especially when one uncompromisingly believes the paramount authenticity of one's ideas. An exclusive claim to truth is part of a project of self-aggrandizement.

Silence is not necessarily arrogant or ignorant. A silent acknowlegement of the human condition is also an acceptance that with communication comes mis-communication. Human action is invariably imperfect; much is lost in translation. Whether mis-communication leads to violent reprisal or further attempts at understanding is left to the participants in the encounter. Those who impose certain truth rationalize violent means in pursuit of absolute ends. For them, freedom is to be left alone...for eternity. There is, evidently, not purity to be found on a planet where man is imperfect and limited. The divine will works within the chosen few - the exclusivity of aristocratic distance is most pronounced in Calvin, wherein only a chosen few among the chosen few are to be saved.

----------

So what's so bad about being alone? The moments when I grow weary of my solitude revive thoughts of what might have been. Romanticism is invariably revisionist. What might have been hurts me profoundly. While dining at a restaurant, I will often look across the table remembering a time when she was there, thinking that she should be there, and realizing that she is not. Those moments hurt. Those moments make me painfully aware of my solitude. But the pain leads to personal insight. I realize that solitude is not simply a matter of choice or purely a product of circumstance; in truth, intentionality is often inconsequential to it. Solitude is part of the human condition; and the task of life is to shake alienation, returning us back to relationship.

I don't know why she is central to my thoughts about the past. She infects my memories, suffused throughout the space between past and present, and will be scattered along the path between now and tomorrow. Usually, the yearning for better times quickly pass and I return to my table for one, returning to my meal. And from time to time the idea of her returns to comfort and torment.

It is the feeling of loneliness that compounds existental incompleteness. And it is this incompleteness, axiously awaiting an encounter that may never happen, that makes solitude unbearable. However, solitude is necessarily a part of a thoughtful life. It is in solitude that clarity emerges. In understanding that loneliness is part of life, a person confronts the conditions integral to a thoughtful engagement with the limitless strangeness of the human condition.