I remember a time as an adolescent when I began to think that books and art and research and writing were somehow more fulfilling than interacting with actual people. What the Hell is wrong with me? Am I (GASP!) antisocial because I would rather read this book than go to this party?!?
I decided early on that I would officially stop caring what it made me. As I grew up, I became more of an extrovert. However, the quiet, reserved thinker still tends to show more often than not. Watching this video reminded me of a fact that my journey to Thailand has made me profoundly remember: THANK GOD I was one of those weird kids who loved my alone time. How else would I remember that in a Smartphone world with constant possibility for interaction?
During the past three years, stress and grief would often make me forget that fact. I would wonder where my love of solidarity went; I would long for it, I would seek it out. I would get frustrated when I couldn't find it in the same places I used to. I would distract myself endlessly between work and school and everything else, hoping to again find it someday.
When I supplanted myself from all things familiar - when the internet would go out for days on end and monsoons flooded the streets and all I had was a room with a bed and a Bruce Lee book and pen and paper - I was forced to finally face solidarity. There it was, staring me in the face for hours on end. Just me and my brain. No distractions. White walls. A bed. A toilet. A fridge with water bottles and electrolyte packets, Baht coins in a cup on top of it, a room key next to a pack of gum that melted in the heat.
At first, the isolation was jarring. Terrifying, even. But now...
Now, I remember.
A room alone is far from empty; the mind alone is never a prison because it cannot be confined. A mind left alone is limitless.Vladimir Nabokov, the author of the infamous Lolita, explicated the idea in twelve sophistically sanguine lines of Pale Fire's introductory poem:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane
I was the smudge of ashen fluff--and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky,
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
10 Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
-Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, First Canto
In this canto, the protagonist describes how images reflect in a window by assuming the identity of whatever is reflected in the window's glass pane. It is a protagonist lost in the ecstasy of imagination, imagining consciousness from every minute and grandiose detail of life - observing closely enough to feel himself float like an ashen fluff caught in an updraft, or the dead bird (waxwing) that smashed head-first into the glass, tricked "by the false azure in the windowpane." Lost in the illusion of how the reflection of furniture on the inside pane meets the horizon line visible outside and makes the bed "exactly stand...Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!"
But the point of it is this: the mind turns something as simple as a window reflection into pure magic. It passes the most mundane of details through the imagination and churns out poetry. Find a lonely window in an empty room, and marvel at what you might find if you shut off the idea that alone = bad. What wonder lies in ideas when we stop long enough to form good ones!
But for every possibility of turning trivial detail into tremendous beauty, the mind is capable of equally tremendous darkness.
Therein lies the fear.
Therein lies the reason why checking your phone is so much easier than letting the mind wander.
Still - Smartphones and all - the world is still not yet enough to fill the solidarity of the mind. The physical world, even if broken into each infinitesimal part, strung out atom for atom, cannot annihilate the basic truth of existing as a singular individual. It cannot fill the self. Put more simply - at the end of the day, you're always alone. Whether you're in an empty studio in Bangkok or wrapped up in the arms of a husband or a wife. For all your contacts and connections and loved ones. No matter how tightly you cling to everything else, you exist as something independent of all other things. No one will ever see the movie that rolls on through your head, no matter how many words you write. People fade out. They die, they move, and nothing ever stays the same.
People will read that paragraph a number of ways. For many, it will be too harsh to think about; something to be feared and forgotten as quickly as possible. The whole idea of Alone summons demons from the darkest cataclysms of the mind, slithering up from the subconscious like the shadows of the monster hiding just out of sight. It is the adult Boogeyman; it lives under your bed, and you never know when you might feel it there. You can't see it, but you can feel it lying underneath you, waiting to wrap you in the cold embrace of its truth: no one else is really there. Even when you're lying next to someone. It's no guarantee they'll stick around, or that they mean what they say. Never will you find immunity from death and loss and the destruction of whatever you're holding onto to delude yourself otherwise.
It's no wonder people cling. It's natural - paleolithic humans who traveled in groups lived longer, healthier lives because of the simple calculus of strength in numbers. Those who had the strongest urge to be part of the group survived, passing their genes encoded with innate desire to belong onto the next generation, then the next. This instinct was borne of an era where belonging meant shelter, food, sex, warmth; solitude meant cold, starvation, hardship. The world was wild, and we were, too.
How wild it is, then, to return to that state - to be alone.
To stray from the safety of the pack.
Henry David Thoreau was one who strayed. He left his father's pencil factory to live alone in the woods and write poetry. What a hippie, the world said. What a hippie, the world still says. Thoreau summed up his decision for wildness this way:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
But Thoreau was never writing about solitude in the evolutionary sense. Thoreau is not talking about deprivation, starvation, cold, and everything the Ape Brain associates with being away from the group. What Thoreau wrote struck at the core of a transcendental idea, one which prevails over the Ape Brain in one simple way.
But, in that way, solitude is intensely illusory. The acute sensation of being alone - of starving shelterless in the cold - no longer applies. We live in a world with six billion people. With smartphones. With Facebook. With six billion other people with the same alone-hating DNA.
So why the Hell do so many people disparage and still fear being alone??? Why do we all relate to this video so much?
Perhaps we aren't forced to face it often enough to remember how small and weak a beast solitude actually is. Perhaps all of our distractions have taken us out of practice. Without that metaphorical check under the bed before we go to sleep, the monster under the bed grows more and more vicious in our minds each day.
Maybe the answer is simple, like so many answers are: face your fear. Pull the car over and sob like Louie did and wait for happiness to come back to you. Learn that lesson.
Then, entertain the idea that you can ditch your proverbial pencil factory and wander into the woods like Thoreau. It won't really be terrifying like you imagine. In fact, you'll amaze yourself with the wonders you find there. Maybe then the fear will fade, and one day you will notice how much stronger you are for facing it without your Smartphone. Only then will being alone feel like independence instead of solitude.
