The solidarity of the aesthetics of loneliness
Imagine the mid-afternoon, and it has to be from a warm summer too. Music you last heard twenty-five years ago plays, driving your mind backwards over the years, over all the intervening warm afternoons. Each one was spent alone; and thus they create that most paradoxical of all emotions, the solidarity of loneliness; one that, as the existentialists tell us, unites our past and leads ineluctably to the future, to that great and solemn and lonely moment of death. Although, perhaps it is instead trivial, an ending of an experience that no-one could see in any case. Nostalgia, loneliness, sorrow; all have their most distinct flavour, and it is by no means an unpleasant one either. But if we press into the thickets of thought and experience surrounding it, as usual I don't think we find anything apart from more tangles - there is no clearing in the forest, so to speak.
Like those in depressions, who are convinced that their bleak view represents true realism as opposed to the deceptions of lighter moods, one can ask the question: is to be lonely what existence is "really" like, with moments of community simply misleading and illusory? What is, indeed, a moment of community? And can there be communal aesthetics, as opposed to the simple solipsism of the experience of being alone? For is it not the case that, spread over all our space and time is a golden tangle of threads, each growing and fading to nothing, some long and some short, but never touching, How can there enoguh space for them all?
