Reality Hunger (55 page)

alone

Democracy turns man’s imagination away from externals to concentrate on himself alone. Democratic peoples may amuse themselves momentarily by looking at nature, but it is about themselves that they are really excited. Here, and here alone, are the true springs of poetry among them, and those poets, I believe, who do not draw inspiration from these springs will lose their hold over the audience they intend to charm.

Not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

For ten years I traveled all over Hungary, visiting the homeless and the poor. I interviewed gypsies living in dire conditions
and Hungarian workers, many of whom came from peasant backgrounds. In all, I did some two thousand interviews. The more people I met, the more life stories I heard and the more persuaded I became that it is almost impossible to know someone else completely. We radiate feelings to others, but ultimately we are alone. For me, the essence of life is how we handle our loneliness.

While there is no objective world beyond our individual capacity to comprehend it—that is, nothing outside of ourselves to let us off the hook for our personal failures—the individual must still deny this subjectivity in order to be, to exist, to effect his particular project. He must lose himself in order to find himself.

We are always only in our own company.

We are adrift, alone in the cosmos, wreaking monstrous violence on one another out of frustration and pain.

Personal lyricism is the outcry of prisoner to prisoner from the cell in solitary where each is confined for the duration of his life.

Nothing can make of Kafka a bad writer, but there were things that lay outside his ken: the communal, the shared, the necessary social lie, and, most significantly, other people. That Kafka finally comprehended this lack in himself, that he measured
the shape and depth of his own wound—this is what makes him an information bureau of the human condition.

In the end one experiences only oneself.

All alone is all we are.