It Is Lonely When You're Among People, Too
Written somewhere in the Namibian desert, on a morning that felt borrowed from ordinary time. A piece about loneliness, memory, and still looking for the right adjective.
"Where are the people?" resumed the little prince at last. "It's a little lonely in the desert…" "It is lonely when you're among people, too," said the snake.
I was reading Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies yesterday — one of those remarkably visceral novels capable of rupturing commonly accepted principles at the seams — and it sent me back to Saint-Exupéry. I distantly recall reading him as a requirement for high school French, but so often when literature becomes a set work, words have more function than form. My sixteen year old self — and, arguably, my thirty-three year old self just a few months ago — would not have recognised, in the sparse words of the snake in The Little Prince, one of my own most intimate truths.
We woke up alone in the desert this morning, and the experience felt antithetical to the familiar melancholic chime of loneliness. The absence of people around us became a reassurance of our own presence in each other's lives. The feeling of existing in a timeless capsule, suspended somewhere elsewhere from what we know, felt so liberating. Elsewhere from what we know, because so often what we know is intricately caught up in the mindless orbit of daily routine.
We started our drive this morning listening to the soundtrack of the Sunday mornings of my adolescence — Part I of Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert. Whenever I hear Jarrett's finger hit the first key in that piece, a moment in time is universal: my father is typing in the study, there is a smell of filter coffee, and my mother is reading. I am not sure if this memory is merely an instrument of my invented nostalgia, but I like it all the same. It is comforting.
And here, perhaps, I am prepared to allow for a lapse in historical empiricism. If a memory is comforting, does it need to be based in fact? Lauren Groff has clearly found her way into me somehow. I was reminded of her while reading 'Fates and Furies' yesterday — one of those remarkably visceral pieces of writing capable of rupturing commonly accepted principles at the seams and leaving the reader —?
I still can't find that adjective.
