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\n\t\t\tLoneliness is the fundamental condition of life \u2014 we are born by another, but born alone; die around others (if we are lucky and loved), but die alone; we spend our lives islanded in our one and only human experience \u2014 in these particular bodies and minds and circumstances drawn from the cosmic lottery \u2014 amid the immense ocean of time and chance teeming with all possible experience. Everything of beauty and substance that we make \u2014 every poem, every painting, every friendship \u2014 is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.
\nCard from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.
\nBut despite being so fundamental, or perhaps precisely because of it, loneliness is fractal \u2014 the closer you look at the granularity of life, the more you see it branching into myriad lonelinesses, which, like the kinds of sadness, all have different emotional hues.
\nThe loneliness of feeling invisible or misunderstood, bottomless and bone-chilling as the Scottish fog.
\nThe loneliness of seeing what others look away from, remote and shoreless as a lighthouse.
\nThe loneliness of public humiliation, a red-hot iron rod.
\nThe loneliness of your most private failure, inky and arid like the desert at night.
\nThe loneliness of success, shiny and sharp as obsidian.
\nThe loneliness of love, lightless as the inside of a skull.<\/p>\n
In his 2008 psychology classic Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection (public library), Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson groups all the possible lonelinesses into the three core kinds that pulsate beneath our daily lives and govern our search for love: the past-oriented loneliness of missing what once was and never again will be, the future-oriented loneliness of longing for what could be but has not come to pass, and what he calls \u201cthe profound loneliness of being close to God.\u201d This I take to mean the existential disorientation of feeling your transience press against the edge of the eternal, your smallness press against the immensity that dwells at the intersection of time, chance, and love; God is just what some call their dream of a crosswalk when they face that intersection.
\nThe first two lonelinesses are rooted in time, which is itself fractal \u2014 there are many kinds of time we live with. The third kind of loneliness deals not with the temporal but with the eternal; it exists outside of time \u2014 like music, like wonder, like love. It is an existential loneliness, a creative loneliness, made not from the atoms of now that compose the other two lonelinesses but from the atoms of forever.
\nCard from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print.
\nBecause we, creatures made of time, cannot comprehend forever, it is easy to call it God \u2014 that catchall for everything immense and incomprehensible we face in ourselves. But this is an illusion \u2014 forever too is fractal, with myriad visitations of it in our daily lives. In a testament to James Baldwin\u2019s timeless insistence that \u201cthe poets\u2026 are finally the only people who know the truth about us,\u201d it is not the psychologists or the philosophers but the poets who part the veil of illusion to reveal the truth:
\nSOME KINDS OF FOREVER VISIT YOUby Brenda Hillman
\nThe unknowns are up early;they browse through the bronze\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0porch bells. Crows\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0call & late\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0apples blaze\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0toward western emptiness.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In your illness,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0the edges hesitate;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0like the revoltof workers, they\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0will take a while\u2026
\nHere comes the fond\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0mild winter; other\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0realms are noisy\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0& unanimous. You tapthe screen & dream\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0while waiting; four\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0kinds of forever\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0visit you today:something, nothing,everything & art,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0greater than you are\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0& of your making \u2014<\/p>\n
Poem courtesy of the Academy of American Poets<\/p>\n