Why Loneliness Might Be OK

I just want to note this article, on Why We're Fated to be Lonely (But That's OK) from the School of Life, here. It snagged me with the introduction:

'There are few more shameful confessions to make than that we are lonely. The basic assumption is that no respectable person could ever feel isolated – unless they had just moved country or been widowed.

Yet in truth, a high degree of loneliness is an inexorable part of being a sensitive, intelligent human. It’s a built-in feature of a complex existence.'

I find life lonely, much of the time, and I don't pretend it to be otherwise. Yet I do refrain from mentioning it, because I do feel like it does render one 'pathetic' (and because no-one who has tried to talk about loneliness is looking for advice).

I did like the point that once we accept loneliness we can get creative, sending out messages in a bottle by such means as writing blogs. I recalled a time when folks on the same page of the soul did find their way here, and I was cheered by interacting with you, though those times might now have passed.

How the above connects to my next quote is perhaps somewhat abstruse, but I had a birthday recently, and a work colleague gave me the book Right Ho, Jeeves, by PG Wodehouse, in an attempt to spread their Wodehouse delight. Now I confess that my relationship to "comedy" is a little tenuous and unpredictable, and I was not certain I was going to be genuinely amused, but a few pages in and I came to these paragraphs, and was very much amused (and I think I shall enjoy Gussie and the Bassett!). Here's to the people all loaded down with ideals and sentiment:

'It was not her beauty, mark you, that thus numbed me. She was a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of breath-taker that takes the breath.

No, what caused this disintegration in a usually fairly fluent prattler with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.

As regards the fusing of her soul and mine, therefore, there was nothing doing. But with Gussie, the posish was entirely different. The thing that had stymied me--viz. that this girl was obviously all loaded down with ideals and sentiment and what not--was quite in order as far as he was concerned.

Gussie had always been one of those dreamy, soulful birds--you can't shut yourself up in the country and live only for newts, if you're not--and I could see no reason why, if he could somehow be induced to get the low, burning words off his chest, he and the Bassett shouldn't hit it off like ham and eggs.'