“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies——all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

-(?!)-

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell. Harper Perennial, 1954.

Absinthe. I found this quote when I was flipping through the journal I kept over the summer. Not sure what it meant to me back in August, but now it makes for good inspiration.

Solipsistic crises would hit sporadically throughout adolescence; green moments of terror in realizing that who you are to yourself is exclusive content. I think, therefore I am shrivelled by the prospect of everyone else. What are these strangers? What are these friends? 

I got over these moments pretty quickly because it was too absurd even for my tastes——just little old me out here? Really Descartes? I guess it all comes down to faith, then, a sort of conviction in one’s ability to graze the fibres of another being; conversation as proof of oneself.

Loneliness, however, I think is an essential condition of life isolated from any depressed philosophical takes, and Huxley speaks to that in contrast to our natural attempts at binding with another. Have you ever wanted to crawl into someone? You know what I mean, right? Siamese twin grafting surgery: “Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain”——it’s a natural sort of ambition that lives and dies in the arms of another. But they’re an-other, and so it stays there, something like a chemical reaction where the elements are isolated at the will of distance or heartbreak or compounded confusion.

It’s a necessary kinship that one makes with oneself, a survival pact taken upon realizing that it really is just this body and just this mind. Is that why we often regard ourselves in the second-person, I wonder? To cope with this conditional isolation? A severance of the mind and the reflection, the creation of the self-containing “you“: the way that Elliott Smith sings “nobody broke your heart/If you’re alone it must be you that wants to be apart”——what hangs in the mirror serves as a face to blame, the you that contradicts itself, a means of forcing company (“Alameda”).

But this, what I’m doing now, what Smith and Huxley do, “through symbols and at second hand”——is it working? Is it half-right in the eyes of the reader? Even in discussing the isolating nature of consciousness, Huxley offers a camaraderie in his analogy of “a society of island universes.” Society implies companionship antithetical to the described isolation. Perhaps when I wrote this quote down back in August it was out of an appreciation for its stark dissection, or maybe I just thought that it was well-written, but in this frigid December I find it to be vaguely optimistic despite the depressed connotations of the word “solitude.” We can’t help but try to make sense of it all, right? Despite our understanding that everyone will make a different sense of it? Solipsism shrivelled by the natural inclination towards faith in one and other, by our Sisyphean ventures to communicate the incommunicable through verse or song or conversation, even with the knowledge of it being in vain. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” or whatever (“Sisyphus”). 

That got long. Sorry. It’s a good book, The Doors named themselves after it. Give it a read!

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Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1942. Translated by Justin O’Brien. Penguin Vintage Books, 2018.

Smith, Elliott. “Alameda.” Either/Or, Kill Rock Stars, 1997. open.spotify.com/album/5bmpvyP7UGq
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