• Vinson
    8
    When I was about 18 years old I read the following words by the Lebanese artist, poet, and author Kahlil Gibran in a short collection of his writing entitled The Voice of the Master.

    Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life is an island separate from all the other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to others and far removed from their sympathy and understanding.

    A few paragraphs later Gibran concludes that solitude is the price we pay for being unique individuals. In his view, we could completely know another, and thus escape our solitude, only if we were identical with them. I’m not sure that conclusion follows but I do think he’s right that we are, at the deepest level, alone. We can ameliorate this loneliness by sympathizing with and loving others, but we never clearly see the world from their point of view nor they from ours.

    I’ve had good friends, loving parents and children, but even they don’t know me nor do I know them completely. Even my wife and I, loving companions for almost forty years, remain partly mysterious to each other. We might even say that we are strangers to ourselves too. But then the self isn’t alone so much as illusory. For who is this me that doesn’t know myself? Is that some other me? And is there another me that doesn’t that me? Such questions can be asked ad infinitum. This is the flip side of saying that I do know myself. But who is this me that knows myself? Is that some other me? And is there is another me that knows that me? Again we confront an infinite regress.

    In the end, I think we are both opaque and transparent to ourselves and to others. I think that’s because we are, simultaneously, both the same and different as everyone else, although I realize these statements are paradoxical. In the end, we just know so little about life. We live, not only alone but largely in the dark.

    Personal Note – In one of the very first philosophy classes I took as an undergrad the Professor told us that this would be serious philosophy, not feel good stuff like … Gibran. Wow was I disheartened. I was only 18 and proud that I had read Gibran. Of course, I now know what the professor meant—good analysis is necessary for good philosophy and Gibran’s poetry was hardly analytical. But sometimes poetic language is so memorable as to sear an idea into the mind better than analytical prose. And that’s why I’ve always remembered those words.

    "Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness.”

    A beautiful image of a profound insight.
  • T Clark
    13k
    I do think he’s right that we are, at the deepest level, alone. We can ameliorate this loneliness by sympathizing with and loving others, but we never clearly see the world from their point of view nor they from ours.Vinson

    That's not how I see it. Feel about it. I don't feel the solitude you write about. I feel other people all around me. There has always been a distance between myself other people, although that has changed some as I've gotten older. I make friends more easily. Love people more easily. I guess that sounds contradictory, but it doesn't feel that way. I'm not an outdoorsman, but it's important to me to know there are wild places in the world. I can feel them even if I never visit them. I feel the same way about people. Even if I'm not intimate with a lot of other people, I can feel them out there.

    In the end, I think we are both opaque and transparent to ourselves and to others. I think that’s because we are, simultaneously, both the same and different as everyone else, although I realize these statements are paradoxical. In the end, we just know so little about life. We live, not only alone but largely in the dark.Vinson

    Isn't this true about everything in the world, not just ourselves and other people? We never know anything perfectly. Why would we expect we would with others, even those we are close to. It's a matter of trying to see them as they are without judgment. For me, that feels like enough.

    Welcome to the forum.
  • Gord
    24
    Some thoughts about loneliness.
    Loneliness is something i no longer experience or can even relate to. I think people who feel loneliness have a desire to be defined by others; to be given their identity. As to your idea that loneliness can be ameliorated through the expression of sympathy, i feel as though yes this may make us feel better, but its effects are only temporary and afterwords i think people are even worse off. This is how people become addicted to other people i believe.

    To the first poster vinson, regarding your questions of self. I do not believe the mind, while experiencing a state of solitude is capable of knowing itself. To believe such, i believe is folly and insanity. (refer to the life of the great nietzche) I believe we can only truly know ourselves moment by moment in interactions with fellow man.
  • Gord
    24
    What do you think about my thoughts on loneliness though mr Posty?
  • Shawn
    12.6k


    I don't know. It's a depressing feeling. At one instance we feel as though we can emulate other emotions and feelings of other's through empathy and sympathy for the welfare of others and chickens, I hope.

    Speaking from personal experience, I have felt lonely sometimes (very rarely) in the past; but, have learned to live with it or it has never bothered me to any significant extent. I guess one can dwell over the feeling as many do...

    I'll come back to this thread later when I have all my thoughts down.
  • Gord
    24
    Cool, i look forward to it.
  • Shawn
    12.6k
    I'm not sure how to generalize the feeling of loneliness. It's such a peculiar feeling of all the gamut of human emotions.

    But, I'd like to elucidate that the feeling is a performative contradiction. If anyone is familiar with the beetle in a box logical experiment or the illogicality of a private language or to live in a solipsistic world, then the point should become apparent fairly soon.

  • BC
    13.1k
    I do think he’s right that we are, at the deepest level, aloneVinson

    Yes, "alone" but not necessarily "lonely". We are "alone" in that we can not merge with our fellow beings, because we are not a hive creature. But then, even ants have some individuality -- not much, but a little. That we are "alone" is a universal idea.

    Gibran is one among many who have described persons, people, as "lonely". Maybe "longing" would be another term for our very common low-level dissatisfactions. We long for more connection, more community--usually with others of our kind, sometimes with deities.

    Life is an island in an ocean of loneliness, an island whose rocks are hopes, whose trees are dreams, whose flowers are solitude, and whose brooks are thirst. Your life is an island separate from all the other islands and regions. No matter how many are the ships that leave your shores for other climes, no matter how many are the fleets that touch your coast, you remain a solitary island, suffering pangs of loneliness and yearning for happiness. You are unknown to others and far removed from their sympathy and understanding.Vinson

    Gibran's language is kind of romantic. By 'romantic' I mean he is elevating loneliness and solitude in the manner of Romantic period poets (Blake, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth). Personally, I can't stand too much romantic poetry or prose, but it's a matter of taste. Some people lap it up. Gibran doesn't belong to the Romantic Movement, but that sort of style does. (And I don't mean to imply that Romantic poets were all about squishy, mushy emotional language.)

    Here's an earlier poet's take: John Donne, 1572-1631:

    'No Man is an Island'

    No man is an island entire of itself; every man
    is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
    if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
    is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
    well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
    own were; any man's death diminishes me,
    because I am involved in mankind.
    And therefore never send to know for whom
    the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
  • Shiva Surya Sai
    4
    Loneliness is when you feel sad for being alone and really want some friends. - extrovert style

    Solitude is when you feel thankful for being alone - Introvert style
  • Mwilliams
    1
    Loneliness is when you believe someone else can fill the empty feeling you have inside. You must learn to care for it yourself or you will always look for someone else to fix it, which will never work out.
  • gurugeorge
    514
    As with most things, it's a bell-curve distribution. A few people are ok with being alone (and for them being alone is solitude rather than loneliness, a positive value, as above said), most are a bit uncomfortable with it to varying degrees, or for too long, and a few can't stand being alone for any length of time at all. It's the same with the obverse circumstance: some can't stand crowds, some love 'em.

    On the mystical side, there's quite a paradox here. OK, so initially you feel separate and alone, but you have a fugitive sense that intimacy or oneness or togetherness are possible, and they can heal the pain of separateness. You go on a spiritual path. You discover that the sense of being separate is illusory, and that there's nothing here but the Universe, and you are THAT. Very good.

    But there's a cruel trick here, because yes, the mystical insight draws everything into a unity - or rather, it's the realization that everything already is a unity. So that former sense of being a feeble little thing lost in a vast unknown Void is gone. But isn't the Universe itself (or "God" if you prefer that terminology) alone in another, deeper sense?

    What is there to compare IT to? What friend can IT have? It can't have the pleasure of discovering unity any more, neither in affairs of the heart nor the life of the mind. It is truly alone, with no peer, no other.

    And this is why many spiritual traditions have this sense of a "Path Up" and a "Path Down." The path up is the seemingly separate thing discovering its impersonal nature, the path down is God's yearning for something else, his creation of a playmate, or at least of the possibility of there seeming to be playmates.

    IOW, perhaps, just as Man's mystical work is dissolution in the All, so God's mystical work is kenosis, the very hiding in the illusion of separateness that you start off with when you're born. Of course God's work requires actual omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence (in order to create the - so to speak - "solid illusion" of the world), whereas all Man's work needs is a little bit of grit and determination, and love of Truth.
  • Greta
    27
    As the saying goes, "a part and yet apart" (also the title of an excellent jazz album by Earthworks).

    I find myself less in need of company with age, loneliness has become solitude. I find dogs wonderful in that respect because you need not deal with the inevitable mental fritz of other nearby humans. Dogs simply don't have the mental power to intrude on one's space that humans have.

    Watching the rise of misanthropy on social media for some years as overcrowded denizens increasingly get into each others' way, I am bemused by this human compulsion to live together in claustrophobic groups. Cities annoy their occupants no end, with endless complaints and bickering, yet here many of us are.

    So Humanity, the question must be asked. If you find other people so problematic, why are you joining the huddle?

    Humanity would then reply - did I have a choice? Who is more likely to survive - a large society of battle-hardened, cranky people with powerful immune systems or a slower, less intense, more sparsely populated society? Indigenous people displaced by overcrowded westerners and easterners know the answer to that one.

    We humans have effectively been forced by natural, group and cultural selection to cram ourselves into societies that irritate us and have us dreaming of rural life away from the hubbub. Increasingly, though, we are separating within the larger group - with fewer extended families living together, fewer intact nuclear families, and ever more singles seeking to live alone.

    Nonetheless, the innate existential panic of being apart from the group - having come from groups compelled to clump together - remains in us to a greater or lesser extent as gurugeorge said above. This compulsion somewhat masks the powerful destabilising effect people have on each other. We are intense animals that are not always prone to compromise. Hence the beauty, and increased popularity, of dogs :)
  • praxis
    6.2k


    My six month old Australian Shepard isn’t always prone to comprise. I think we have months more of extensive training to go. He’s a good companion though.
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