Loneliness (Roman Ruminations Book 1)

If you want to find out what loneliness is, go off by yourself; not to pout in that nearby corner, but into a transoceanic expatriation. Off to Rome, then!

Once there, you immerse yourself in culture and the past, you savor loneliness at leisure. But Rome is no desert of solitude. Others intrude. There are social encounters in spite of yourself,--with tourists and with the locals. There are cultural events, socializing, parties.

Soon you've settled in, gotten yourself a job, even as you pursue a different vocation.

That vocation is writing. Even there, the past may be a problem. The read is the lived. There are scriptures to overcome, author-models to fend off, originality to be sought, as you try to utter yourself absolute.

As for loneliness, it has nothing to do with writing. Literary solitude is a work-discipline, not a complex.

Inspired by an ideal, the writer criticizes criticism, criticizes himself, masters technique, burns with ambition.

Meanwhile, life in Rome is tedium and boredom, lulls and lapses. Traveling is just an aimlessness, do-more no sure way to become more. We all fritter away our lives rethinking our lives.

We look to the other, only to suffer indifference, disappointment, rejection, estrangement. Where is love, happiness, heaven?

There is always suicide to consider, but how about a lighter load, like insomnia and nightmares?

The morning of a new day arrives. Our malaise may be not so much psychological as merely physiological. There is an innate instinct toward health.

Living neither in the past nor elsewhere, but here-and-now, we find our rescue and redemption from loneliness in attunement to Nature, in the experience of love, and in the transcendent joy of music.

LONELINESS is volume one of ROMAN RUMINATIONS, the psychology of the human as an enculturated animal.