The Fear of Being Alone

Last evening I enjoyed two pieces of the human imagination that, while different on the surface, still shared a common thread. I sat down and watched the movie "The Awakening," about a woman investigating an alleged haunting; it seems a common horror film theme, but it was quite well done, with the frightening moments used just enough to heighten the tension at key points without being overblown as so many other horror films are. The other bit of human creativity was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, a beautiful work that is hard to describe save that it is about a Holocaust survivor and the book he wrote in his youth, which he thought destroyed. The thread that ties them together in my mind is that loneliness is at the heart of the stories they tell. Loneliness is, in fact, a theme in much of human storytelling, from the loneliness of the Doctor all the way back to the loneliness of Odysseus as he was trapped on the isle of Calypso.

I recalled last evening from my half-remembered undergraduate course on Greek history that some scholars believe that the first mega cities, the "metropolises" of the Hellenistic period, led to a feeling of social isolation among those city dwellers, an isolation that persists to this day. But of course one doesn't need to be in a metropolitan area to feel socially isolated, to feel lonely. All of us are lonely, I think, whether we admit to that fact or not. This feeling lies at the heart of human emotion; loneliness, and the fear of being alone. Our social rules alone demonstrate just how afraid we are of isolation. Consider for a moment the kind of punishments we mete out, ranging from being given the "cold shoulder" or being shunned to legal punishments like solitary confinement or exile. Sometimes we even consider it worse than death to send someone into social isolation--we fear it that much. Given what we know about the emergence of humanity, this makes perfect sense. For our ancestors, survival was much easier within a social group than outside it. Those who were unsocial and outside of the group were less likely to survive, and the echo of this ancient reality remains with us today.

Humans go to great lengths to suppress that feeling of loneliness, and we are eternally creative in how we address this fundamental crisis of our existence. Our efforts to end our solitude can range from finding friends who share our interests and companions to share our lives, to religiosity and some of the destructive mass movements both past and present. Sometimes how we view our entertainment is directly related to how well it takes us away from ourselves, even for a moment, whether it is a diverting read or a captivating film.

All of us are lonely in some way or other. The same feeling that can lead us to seek love can drive us to hate just as ferociously, to take our own lives in the most extreme cases. We can use it to create things of great beauty out of our own personal pain, like the art of Van Gogh or the works of Lord Byron--or we can use it to join in hateful, destructive acts that merely spread a personal misery around. We can reach out to others in our loneliness, or we can draw back. The choice is ours, and it is how we address our loneliness that helps to define who we are.