solitude vs. loneliness

I don’t consider myself a particularly social person. I’m not a fan of large parties or gatherings, am generally bad about keeping in touch with folks, and the idea of meeting and chatting up with complete strangers continues to both mystify and terrify me. And more often than not, I find myself greatly looking forward to or even craving periods of solitude - be it having the house to myself while my sister travels somewhere on vacation (or just goes up to SF for the weekend) - or preferring to stay at a hotel while visiting other cities even though I may have friends who can accommodate me. The ability to be in full control of my own schedule, what I’m going to eat, and what I’m going to do without having to worry about the needs of anybody else is liberating.*

Part of the problem here, I think, is that I generally exert way too much attention and effort to make sure whoever I’m with - if I care about them at all - is happy. Which usually means trying to figure out what it is they want and doing that, even if it’s not necessarily what I want for myself. I also fully recognize this as not simply being nice or selfless by any means - my motive for pleasing others is generally entirely selfish, be it because I simply derive greater pleasure from making said person happy, or because some inexplicable sense of insecurity, or most likely, some combination of both. But I digress...

The fact of the matter is that I occasionally have the want or need for self-indulgence (be a bum at the computer all day! go eat at favorite restaurant #103! watch this horrible chick flick!), but only allow myself to do so when it doesn’t affect anybody else. And while I certainly have plenty of such opportunities and generally take advantage of and relish every single one, the loneliness invariably creeps in the midst of all this, and I find myself craving for another human presence and for company. This eventually leads to a downward spiral of depression, especially when I realize that there’s nothing I can do about it.**

Which leads me to the conclusion that the fundamental difference between solitude and loneliness is that you can do something about one but not the other. It’s fairly possible (and perhaps even easy) to find solitude amidst a crowded room, but it’s certainly not so possible to find human company, comfort, and presence in an empty one. The tricky thing about all this is that solitude - be it physical or merely mental/emotional - eventually leads one down the path of loneliness. Or at least it does to me.

I’ve definitely had plenty of experience with both, but then I also realize that there are a subset of people I know with whom I’ve never found myself looking for solitude. They are the people who make me feel loneliness rather than solitude in their absence, and perhaps it is their presence that I truly seek in moments of trying to find solitude among others. Naturally, these are generally the people I find myself caring most about and seek most to please.***

I really don’t have anywhere to go with all this. It’s just something that’s been bouncing back and forth in my mind for the past several weeks, perhaps because the moments of solitude and the consequent moments of loneliness have become more frequent of late. In fact, I'm fairly certain that I'm just stating something that's extremely obvious to everybody, and thus am once again writing about something that really isn't worth writing about anyway. Boy, I am good at that. Maybe I should rename this blog to if-i-were-stating-the-obvious.blogspot.com.


* Milan Kundera characterizes this feeling as “lightness” - a freedom from anything that binds us - which is contrasted with, unsurprisingly, “heaviness” - the weight of our relationships, our worries, and pretty much everything else that comes with being a social human being. He similarly writes that we all yearn for lightness, but once we have it, it becomes quite unbearable - thus, “the unbearable lightness of being.”
** And somewhere even further down that spiral, I start having suicidal thoughts of finding a random bar to see if I can get myself to meet random strangers. Unfortunately (or perhaps, fortunately), San Jose has no such places for such self-destructive activity.
*** It remains unclear to me whether I care about them because of this, or if it’s because of this that I care about them so much. I suspect it’s a bit of both, and that this cycle is the source of Calvin-hypersensitivity-of-exponential-proportions.

coincidences

Already breaking my own rules with the whole creativity/writing-as-exploration thing, since instead of actually writing something, I'm going to paste something from my Buzz awhile ago. It's a subject that now floats in and out of my mind every now and then, but nothing concrete has really formed around it just yet...


Excerpts from The Unbearable Lightness of Being on the subject of coincidences.

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Twisting and turning beside the slumbering Tereza, he recalled something she had told him a long time before in the course of an insignificant conversation. They had been talking about his friend Z. when she announced, "If I hadn't met you, I'd certainly have fallen in love with him." [...] We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the "Es muss sein!" to our own great love.

Tomas often thought of Tereza's remark about his friend Z. and came to the conclusion that the love story of his life exemplified not "Es muss sein!" (It must be so), but rather, "Es könnte auch anders sein" (It could just as well be otherwise).

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After Tomas had returned to Prague from Zurich, he began to feel uneasy at the thought that his acquaintance with Tereza was the result of six improbable fortuities. But is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of a cup.

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Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "Co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty.

Early in the novel that Tereza clutched under her arm when she went to visit Tomas, Anna [Karenina] meets Vronsky in curious circumstances: they are at the railway station when someone is run over by a train. At the end of the novel, Anna throws herself under a train. This symmetrical composition - the same motif appears at the beginning and at the end - may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed precisely in such a fashion.

They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

dreams, and stuff.

I am reading the Sapolsky article on dreams now and suddenly remembering one of the many dreams I had last night (sleep dep usually means a ton of dreams very early on): I was aware that I was dreaming and decided to explore how much I could see, smell, hear, taste, and feel inside the dream itself.

Some things I tried: cranking up the volume on music that was mysteriously playing in the background, noting the complexity of the music and the fact that I could distinguish it very clearly - down to every lyric of the song; noticing the vast array of colors and the distinct sharpness of all the objects and of my surroundings (and thinking to myself - "hey, this almost looks like I'm not dreaming, except I am because it's daytime here but it would be the middle of the night if I were awake").

I also distinctly recall a couple other things: thinking that I should write down the various dreams I was having at the time (something I do quite often - the thinking, that is, not the writing), and also at various points of different dreams, checking to see if I was still dreaming.

Then I tried to make a lot of cool stuff happen and to create things inside my dream (apparate a cute girl! (who likes me!)), though without much success. Apparently, being inside a dream and becoming aware of it doesn't automatically grant you special powers. ;( Then at that point, I decided, "Well, maybe I should try to discover something in this dream that I wouldn't be able to discover in real life. Time to go exploring!"

But clearly, we know where my priorities are. =D