"I was thinking about something this afternoon and you came to mind."
"Thinking about what?"
"The old thoughts. The whole subject of loneliness."
"What, you think I'm lonely?"
"Are you?"
"Me? I've been lonely my whole life. For as long as I can remember, since I was a child. Sometimes being around other people makes it worse."
"Really? Because it always seems..." Ray looked at him, waiting. "Anyway, what about your wife? Didn't you say you were married?"
"When you're young, you think it's going to be solved by love. But it never is. Being close - as close as you can get - to another person only makes clear the impassable distance between you."
Samson paused to think of how his great-uncle Max used to take him to the pool, how he would float on his back while Max did leg lifts in the water, talking to him about love. Love, Max would say, love is the goal of the species. Not shtuping. Shtuping you can do anytime. It's love that's not so easy to find.
"I don't know. If being in love only made people more lonely, why would everyone want it so much?"
"Because of the illusion. You fall in love, it's intoxicating, and for a little while you feel like you've actually become one with the other person. Merged souls, and so on. You think you'll never be lonely again. Only it doesn't last and soon you realize you can only get so close, and you end up brutally disappointed, more alone than ever, because the illusion - the hope you'd held on to all those years - has been shattered.
"But see, the incredible thing about people is that we forget. Time passes and somehow the hope creeps back and sooner or later someone else comes along and we think this is the one. And the whole thing starts all over again. We go through our lives like that, and either we just accept the lesser relationship - it may not be total understanding, but it's pretty good - or we keep trying for that perfect union, trying and failing, leaving behind us a trail of broken hearts, our own included. In the end, we die as alone as we were born, having struggled to understand others, to make ourselves understood, but having failed in what we once imagined was possible."
"People really want that, what did you say, merging souls? Total union?"
"Yes. Or at least they think they do. Mostly what they want, I think, is to feel known."
"But don't you think that being alone is somehow, I don't know, good? That to love someone is one thing, but if it means giving up the part of you that's alone and free..."
"That's just it! How to be alone, to remain free, but not feel longing, not to feel imprisoned in oneself. That is what interests me."
He spoke of human solitude, about the intrinsic loneliness of a sophisticated mind, one that is capable of reason and poetry but which grasps at straws when it comes to understanding another, a mind aware of the impossibility of absolute understanding. The difficulty of having a mind that understands that it will always be misunderstood.
"The misery of other people is only an abstraction, something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence."
"And mistreat each other. won't they?"
"Horrendously."
>> fonte: "Man Walks Into a Room" - por Nicole Krauss
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