You live now alone in a lonely house

It is one of those hot summer nights, when an evening stroll only exacerbates your patience for the heat, and when attempts to reconcile with it runs afoul as you try to lure the favor of Hypnos. Rather dreadfully, you are compelled by that restless mind to crawl out of the damning heat of your bed and onto the computer hoping for something that fills the mind with agreeable tranquillity—boredom that now glistens with hope. The house is silent besides the buzzing insects and swirling fan, and much like the world that is modernity: you live amongst many yet no one, concurrently and simultaneously. You are as cold as the number “1” yet produces the heat signal of a mighty lion. You are part of the impersonal collective yet represents a unique singularity. You, you are contradictory.

A fanciful tale, likely an ad hoc one, supplies the street name of a childhood neighborhood, positioned inside the mazed turns and corners of an old, old island. Once upon a time, that mere inside was part of the periphery. As the tides came and go, a wild beast found itself a companion of the eternal rhythm of the Pacific Ocean. Landing on the sparsely populated island, the tiger dived headstrong into the first alleyway that populated its eyesight. Soon, victoriously, though ghastly to the human eye, emerged the tiger and its next meal, a human. The occurrence became a pattern, and then a part of quotidian life for the islanders. Much like the natural perennial rhythm of the sea tides, it became normal. The street name? Now fittingly, the Tiger Alley. The gore that was once part of life transcended reality and fear, taking the immutable form of a street sign. A name irrelevant to the casual visitor, yet means the world to those that had only known it and nothing else.

Fear is constrained by time, for it neither persists beyond a certain temporality nor does it project the same effects onto its preceptors of different temporal realities. Fear is personal, it is elicited at moments in time, flashes away in moments in time, and eventually becomes history, likely forgotten in time. Fear for the islanders became a tale for entertainment, a tale for the elders to re-purpose the now-forgotten fear into a tool to intimidate, while amusing, the children. But the children grow and the once frightening tale evolves into mirth, because that is what it had always been to them—a tale of fascination, of woos and ahs. The bone-biting spine-shivering fear felt intimately by the old islanders had faltered with time, the gloss of reality now washed away and renewed with a luster of excitement and fancy.

Loneliness defines this era like no other time. The cliche trope of the supposedly telling juxtaposition of the interconnecting World Wide Web and the ever-proliferating loneliness felt by individuals stresses the contradictions of modernity. Technology as a part of civilized life is defined chiefly by, amongst many things, heat. The evolution of technology is the unceasing and perpetual addition of heat into the creatures of human craftsmanship. With every bit of heat added, humans marched an inch closer towards modernity. Fire, gun powder, coal, electricity, nuclear power, battery, and the list grows gnarled long. Communication is now characterized by the electricity that powers your endpoints—computers—and your transmitters—cables and servers, all containing some form of heat, amounting to nothing more than a glorified version of postal services. Yet as part of the growing collective, your sense of belonging erodes and detachment from human connection defines the technology that was meant to bond a humanity growing exponentially. You fear that detachment, that visceral loneliness sitting at the bottom of your mind seeping through the bones and flesh of your decaying body. Fear dominates you and puts you behind the bars of time, for the flow of time ceases to show its tangibility, and though it pertains to you at that particular moment in time, your mind is now bound to eternity, for only time itself is the rescue. You fear the absence of heat that is human connection, yet heat surrounds you second only to air. Fear presupposes the eventuality of the feared event’s realization, yet you live the eventuality as the present, concurrent to its supposed progenitor, fear. Your fear and loneliness will appear incomprehensible to the billions to come and the billions that went, for only you, living this singular moment, understand it, and no one else. You define it, and it defines you. Truly, “you live now alone in a lonely house” (Euripides, Andromache, 1221).

By David