I am hard pressed to consider that not every man believes he “thinks right”. That is that, according to whatever equipping he may have, he has rightly come to any and all conclusions he embraces; and that in one sense he has earned them. He imagines all his weights and balances to be fair, true, rightly assessed and fit for use and applications to whatever observations are filtered through and by them to such conclusion(s). Or, as one once phrased it: “All of a man’s ways are right in his own eyes”. And yet, to be fair, even if such phrasing holds some quasi indictment of a failing and extremely solipsistic estate (even aside from offering any remedy) how could it not be so? What does a man have but his own mind to both see from, and use for?
But this does not ameliorate such sense of indictment. For, even if reaching out (so to speak) to other minds as might seem a salubrious endeavor to gather to one’s self other points of view, the impetus to do so is a frank admission and is itself indictment of such a locked in estate. Our terror at isolation is great…that matter of being lost in (and to) ourselves. Any desire to rid ourselves of such as might be called a dread provinciality only enforces by its exercise, even if seeming brief respite is found, the very truth of it. One need only to do the experiment to know, or by refusal, prove.
Just as on the material level of things, “touch” as we might describe or hold in mind to some imaging never truly takes place (with vast gaps of space made known on molecular levels) even so communications and communing’s assumed (no less in mind) may be no less delusional. The vastness of separation(s), belied by our own processing of experience(s) are often too terrible to consider. Our best attempts to bridge…or escape this too terrible knowing of isolation (does every man die alone?) are more likely to disclose the very frailty of such bridging. A man who has been betrayed, or senses such experience to himself…well…actually…who hasn’t or doesn’t? We cling as much to our victimhood in such, as part and parcel of those seemingly correct weights and balances incorporated, as strongly as we seek relief from that abyss of isolation…that dread knowing of being abandoned into the hole of solitary confinement.
But we are good at (or better yet, practiced in) clever invention. The manufacture of things for an apparent centrality around. If scrupulously maintained by joint effort (yet how we imagine ourselves immune to entropy!) we can warm ourselves with illusions of being together in, and to, a thing. And for some of that brief time described above, enjoy some respite from noxious plumes rising from the basement. But O!, what dreams may come from that untamable miasma beneath.
No, there is no escape but by an invasion. An occupation of our walled city. But no man could want this. No man could even dream of wanting this. It’s what dogs him in night terrors, the unwanted intruder…but…
Does every man die alone?
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