My Soul-and-bones! I’m afire with Loneliness!
It is Loneliness not made of the Empty House and the tamed wild
Door-knobs and Doors and Curtains and the Lonely Errands. Those are
its small-fruits. Itself is my ancient daylight Loneliness dating
from Three-Years-Old when I first began whisperingly analyzing things
and finding little life-items to be of a fierce bitter importance.
If I were living among people, friendly people, then the Loneliness
though unchanged would be disguised and vested with a padded muffling
power--false, belike, and a mistake (but everything _is_ false and a
mistake: only there are wrong mistakes and right mistakes)--but made
of the world-stuff that lets a human being get by in this nervous
life.
But it would be of no use now. I must face Loneliness: and outface
it. I do, and with no effort: for I am Lonelier than Loneliness’s
self. So it feels. This locked-in mood--soon it may be worn down and
outgrown, and the husks blown away in the winds.
But may come after it a wilder Loneliness of being free, fearfully
free: flavored with the heaviness of rain at night and draggledness
of beggar-women’s skirts.--
Meanwhile bright and black among Doors and Door-knobs and Curtains
and Tables burns the fire of this Loneliness with strong, strong
flame. It is mystic agony. There is no thinking in it. There is an
utterly irrational wish, an aching yearning for people: not people
to see, or listen to, or talk to, but--humanness I could _feel_ with
familiarity. I wish for hands and bodies near me: breath for mine
faintly to mingle with: the feel of their human garments in the room
around me: the feel of the pulsing blood in their veins remotely
vibrant in the air: the feel of minds and spirits and throats and
rich warm virile hair of human heads keeping me warmly company. I
have heard one may step rarefied out of this living-place into the
Fourth Dimension, where one feels everything without the efforts of
feeling, and knows everything without the weights of knowing. It
might be that I grope for in this black bright anguish.
Yet I feel rarely rarefied, heavily rarefied, wornly rarefied in this
living-place where Loneliness burns me in strong fire and where I can
shake my life like a hollow gourd and hear the eerie rattling sound I
make in it.
_Late afternoon_