The Soul Remembering Its Loneliness

Love's Loneliness

Old fathers, great-grandfathers,
Rise as kindred should.
If ever lover's loneliness
Came where you stood,
Pray that Heaven protect us
That protect your blood.

The mountain throws a shadow,
Thin is the moon's horn;
What did we remember
Under the ragged thorn?
Dread has followed longing,
And our hearts are torn.

~ W.B. Yeats

Loneliness is one of the conditions Yeats most explored in his poems reflecting very much in his own life his struggle with the universal condition of Man. In spite of his fame as Irish revolutionary and crusader, nobel poet laureate, playwright, and the title of "the greatest living poet" of the 20thC, Yeats could not escape the inalienable truth:

Man comes into this world single, solitary, alone; he will leave it single, solitary, alone.

This is the inescapable truth that gnawed at him as he aged, this was his struggle - the "short, nasty, and brutish" reality of existence: the condition of man is one of loneliness.

We form relationships to weave illusions in the hopes of cementing the truth; we become entangled in webs of emotions to defray the veracity of that embedded realisation; we make connections, we declare our kinship. We create labels to, in a naive fashion, distinguish those that mean more and those less.
We deceive ourselves into believing we can defeat loneliness. We fool ourselves with narratives of love and life - we create the fiction of a significant Other. We place our trust in others in the hopes that others may do the same. We create dependence and co-dependence; we make friendships, we love. We possess, we hoard, we cling on to the relationships that give us meaning, to the things that might keep at bay the spectre of loneliness. We create fictions about how "no man is an island", of the happy-ever-after, of how "love lights up the world" ...

We would do anything to fill the void that claws at the walls of our souls ...

The light will extinguish someday, the illusion will be shattered, the fictions would crumble, the dreams would wither. And with the darkness will return the confrontation of that which we've always known.

We are alone.

Perhaps that's what it is; perhaps that is 'the thing itself'. Perhaps that is what we need to know in order to find peace, to stop hoarding, and craving for the void to be filled.

To embrace the loneliness and not fear it; To live in the moment with the vision of eternity.