To be alive is also to be lonely

Psychologist James Hillman agrees with this Jewish mystical insight: “The Zohar, the main Kabbalist book, makes it clear that the descent is tough; the soul is reluctant to come down and get messed by the world. ‘At the time that the Holy One, be blessed, was about to create the world, he decided to fashion all the souls which would in due course be dealt out to the children of men, and each soul was formed into the exact outline of the body she was destined to tenant. Go now, descend into this and this place, into this and this body.’

“Yet often enough the soul would reply: ‘Lord of the world, I am content to remain in this realm, and have no wish to depart to some other, where I shall be in thralldom, and become stained.’ Whereupon the Holy One, be blessed, would reply: ‘Thy destiny is, and has been from the day of thy forming, to go into that world.’ Then the soul, realizing it could not disobey, would unwillingly descend and come into the world.”¹

The cosmological myths of Plato and the Bible also “place us in the world and involve us with it.” Whereas, “The cosmologies of today—big bangs and black holes, antimatter and curved, ever-expanding space going nowhere—leave us in dread and senseless incomprehensibility. Random events, nothing truly necessary. Science’s cosmologies say nothing about the soul, and so they say nothing to the soul, about its reason for existence, how it comes to be and where it might be going, and what its tasks could be. The invisibilities that we feel enmeshing our lives with what is beyond our lives have been abstracted by the cosmologies of science into the literal invisibility of remote galaxies or waves. They can’t be known or perceived, because they are measured by time, and our lives are mere nanoseconds in the vast panoply of science’s myth. What’s the purpose of anything?

“The creating myth of random events in unimaginable space keeps the Western soul floating in a stratosphere where it cannot breathe. No wonder we look to other myths, like that of Plato’s Er, the book of Genesis, and the Kabbalist Tree. Each of these gives a similar mythical account of how things are: They found us in myths, and the myths unfold downward into one’s personal soul. No wonder, too, that Plato says this about his ‘fable’: ‘It may preserve us, if we are persuaded by it.’

“Loneliness in a child’s heart may be aggravated by fears of the dark, punishing parents, or rejecting comrades. Its source, however, seems to be the solitary uniqueness of each daimon, an archetypal loneliness inexpressible in a child’s vocabulary and formulated hardly better in ours.

For us, as adults: “Moments of dejection drop us into a pool of loneliness. Waves of intense loneliness occur as aftershocks of childbirth, or divorce, of the death of a long-lived partner. The soul pulls back, mourns alone. Twinges of loneliness accompany even a marvelous birthday celebration and a victorious accomplishment. Are these mere hangovers—compensatory falls after unusual heights? Nothing seems to hold against the drop. All the networking that has interlaced our extension outward and downward into the world—family, friends, neighbors, lovers, little routines, and the results of years of work—seem to count for nothing. We feel ourselves curiously depersonalized, very far away. Exiled. No connection anywhere. The spirit of loneliness has taken over.

“To guard against these moments we have philosophies that explain them and pharmaceuticals that deny them. The philosophies say the uprooted and hurried condition of modern city life and impersonal work has created a social condition of anomie. We are isolated because of the industrial economic system. We have become mere numbers. We live consumerism rather than community. Loneliness is symptomatic of victimization. We are victims of a wrong way of life. We should not be lonely. Change the system—live in a cooperative or a commune; work in a team. Or build relationships: ‘Connect, only connect.’ Socialize, join recovery groups, get involved. Pick up the phone. Or ask your doctor for a prescription for Prozac.

“Deeper than social philosophy and social remedy is the account of moral theology. It recognizes in loneliness the sin of the Fall. We are cut off from Eden and from God owing to the Original Sin of humankind. When we feel alone and lost in the valley, we are stray sheep that have wandered from the path of redemption, out of grace and out of faith and therefore out of hope. We can no longer hear the call of the shepherd or obey the bark of his persistently nipping dog hounding our conscience with guilt. We are alone purposely, in order to hear the still small voice whose whispering is drowned out by the madding crowd.

“Moral theology of the East considers the suffering of isolation to be the task imposed on this life by past karmic actions in another reincarnation or as a preparation for the next. Moral theologies whether Eastern or Western subtly transform the sense of loneliness into the sin of loneliness, exacerbating its unhappiness.

“Existentialism, another way of accounting for loneliness, accepts the sufferings of isolation as basic to its theory of human existence. Heidegger or Camus, for instance, places the human being into the situation of ‘throwness.’ We are merely thrown into being here (Dasein). Life is your project; there is nothing to tell you what it’s all about, which of course leaves you feeling existential anxiety and dread. It’s all up to you, each individual alone, since there is no guarantee that anything makes sense.

”These ways of thinking about loneliness—social, therapeutic, moral, existential—make two assumptions that I cannot accept. First, each says that loneliness equates with literal aloneness and consequently is remediable by some sort of human action, such as repenting for sins, therapeutic relating, building the project of your life with your own heroic hands. Second, each assumes that loneliness is fundamentally unpleasant.

“But if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely. Loneliness comes and goes apart from the measures we take. It does not depend on being literally alone, for pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowed. When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary; they are no longer harbingers of sin, or dread, or of wrong. We can accept the strange autonomy of the feeling and free loneliness from identification with literal isolation. Nor is loneliness mainly unpleasant once it receives its archetypal background.

“When we look—or, rather, feel—closely into the sense of loneliness we find it composed of several elements: nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning for ‘something else.’ For these elements and images to show, we first have to focus on them rather than on remedies for being left literally alone. Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair.

“Nostalgia, sadness, silence, and imaginative yearning are also the inmost stuff of religious and romantic poetry in many languages and many cultures. They remind the acorn of its origins. Like E.T. in the Spielberg film the acorn seems nostalgic, sad, silent, and filled with yearning for an image of ‘home.’ Loneliness presents the emotions of exile; the soul has not been able to fully grow down, and is wanting to return. To where? We do not know, for that place the myths and cosmologies say is gone from memory. But the imaginative yearning and the sadness attest to an exile from what the soul cannot express except as loneliness. All it can recall is nostalgia of feeling and an imagination of yearning. And a condition of want beyond personal needs.

“The Platonic myth of growing down says the soul descends in four modes—via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival. First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches. Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs. Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your attachment to this world.”²

1 Gershom Scholem, ed., Zohar—The Book of Splendor: Basic Reading from the Kabbalah (Schocken, 1963), 91.

2 James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 41-62.