Sometimes there is more to yearning than searching for the ONE
A Hard Pill to Swallow
If there is one single undeniable fact to life, it’s this: one day we ARE and one day we ARN’T; One day we come to the world and one day we leave the world and we simply cease to exist. No matter how many tales and stories, beliefs and religions, philosophies and schools of thought have been shaped around this fact trying to interpret and incorporate some meaning in to this insipid hard-to-swallow fact, the objective truth of it remains all the same: we come to the world alone and we leave the world alone. Yet we are social animals and we can not do without connection, attachment, intimacy and love.
The Lonely City
Ironically enough, one of the places we find ourselves to be most lonely is not a cave or a desert in the middle of nowhere, nor is it an isolated island or a jungle far from civilization, but it’s a big over-populated city.
Olivia Laing is one author who has explored this issue in great depth in her marvelously eye-opening book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. In this book-length personal essay, she recounts her story of moving from England to New York broken-hearted — right after she had lost the man of her life. In the absence of love she finds herself clinging hopelessly to the city itself: “the repeated tapestry of psychics and bodegas”, “the bump and grind of traffic, “the live lobsters on the corner of ninth avenue”, “the…
