Was she speaking of herself? She was struggling with doubt at the time of her death - was she searching for her God? Was she feeling the crushing weight of the lack of companionship of a mortal soulmate? Or was she speaking of the heartbreak she saw in those she comforted? It haunts me that she felt loneliness was the most terrible poverty, when she was witness to incredible poverty on a dailly basis. Was she saying that loneliness was worse than starvation? Worse than dying a slow and painful death?
Loneliness is so deeply embedded in me that it has become too encompassing to put to words. Thank Goodness for music ... my only companion who knows me so well and speaks just what I need to hear at the most crucial moments. The depth of pain that loneliness sears me with has made me more alert to others that may need a caring word or subtle touch as our lives may pass in a particular moment.
And so, being struck mute at the thought of putting to words the loneliness that I want so desperately to escape, I will allow others to voice a few words for thought...
Dag Hammarskjold: "Friendship needs no words - it is solitude delivered from the anguish of loneliness."
John Cheever: "A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey's gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind."
Harry Kemp: "Where the vast cloudless sky was broken by one crow I sat upon a hill - all alone - long ago; But I never felt so lonely and so out of God's way, As here, where I brush elbows with a thousand every day."
William Somerset Maugham: "We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: "So lonely 'twas that God himself Scarce seemed there to be."
Edward Gibbon: "The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness."
Blah, blah, blah.
Therefore, I shall...
Rock on.
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