My activities continue from force of habit, and in the company of others I forget the despair which underlies my daily pursuits and pleasure. But when I am alone and idle, I cannot conceal from myself that my life had no purpose, and that I know of no new purpose to which to devote my remaining years. I find myself involved in a vast mist of solitude both emotional and metaphysical, from which I can find no issue.
Bertrand Russell, 1931, Ray Monk, vo.2, p.125
I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don’t know where it goes
But it’s home to me and I walk aloneI walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams
Where the city sleeps
and I’m the only one and I walk aloneMy shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
‘Til then I walk alone
Green Day
Relationships are what we crave and yet we are alienated from others as well as God.
Underlying all occupations and all pleasures I have felt since early youth the pain of solitude. I have escaped it most nearly in moments of love, yet even there, on reflection, I have found that the escape depended partly upon illusion. I have known no woman to whom the claims of intellect were as absolute as they were to me, and wherever intellect intervened, I have found that the sympathy I sought in love was apt to fail. What Spinoza called ”the intellectual love of God” has seemed to me the best thing to live by, but I have not had even the somewhat abstract God that Spinoza allowed himself . . . I have loved a ghost, and in loving a ghost my inmost self has become spectral . . . my most profound feelings have remained always solitary and have found in human things no companionship. The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best, and I am conscious that human affection is to me at bottom an attempt to escape from the vain search for God.
Bertrand Russell, Ray Monk, vol.1., p.531
…no one would choose the whole world on condition of being alone, since man is a political (i.e. social) creature and one whose nature is to live with others. Therefore even the happy man lives with others; for he has the things that are by nature good. And plainly it is better to spend his days with friends and good men than with strangers or any chance persons. Therefore the happy man needs friends.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, 9
What drew me to [him] was that, hearing his voice, I could tell he was very lonesome, very alone, and very lost out in his time. That’s why I dug him.
Bob Dylan on Woody Guthrie
A woman tried to phone a colleague but mis-dialled. She apologised and was about to hang up when the person on the other end of the phone said, ‘Wait! Don’t go! I’m eighty years old and you’re the only person I’ve spoken to all week.’
I feel so alone sometimes. The night is quiet for me. I’d love to be able to sleep. I am glad that everyone is gone now. I’ll probably not rest. I have no need for all this. Help me, Lord.
Elvis Presley
(in his last engagement at the (Las Vegas) Hilton in December 1976, Elvis kept a pad by his bed, and wrote down his thoughts)
