Yesterday I was quite overloaded with impressions of a lovely weekend, so I sat down in the bathtub and re-read George R R Martin’s A Song For Lya. Which is a collection of short stories, and ends with a novella that has the title of the whole book.
And while the novella impressed me last time to the point of tears, this time it left me again a bit bewildered. It is a beautiful tale in itself, but the struggle in the story (love and union versus loneliness) is something that kind of rattled me once again. Most of us have known love at some point, the love you can feel for another person. You can reach out and touch, talk, embrace, have sex, hold each other tightly and you guys can even breathe in the other’s scent. We can be so very close.
Yet in the end we’re all alone in our own world. We talk, but do we speak the truth? We touch, but is the love really there? You say things, but think different things. You try to be who the other person would like you to be, and you do it because you want that person to love you. We do it subconsciously.
Even if you’re married for 80 years, you can never share everything with your loved one. There will always be walls. We try so very hard to be together, to unite, to be one. But we never are.
In the end, all of us, we’re really so ultimately alone in our own head. Behind our walls, behind our thoughts. It is a thought that gets to me; how we can never be as close as I want everyone to be. There’s always secondguessing, secrets, misunderstandings, misdirections, lies, hurts. 6 billion people and we’re alone even when we are together.
It’s a saddening thought – and it really gets to me.
I needed to write this down somewhere, lest I forget.
I find the idea that our individuality is unassailable to be comforting, most of the time. Sharing everything doesn’t appeal to me; I’m content to share enough. Just a thought.