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So far, I’ve only mentioned the loneliness I was feeling; I haven’t said much about it. I agree with those who call it the most unbearable of emotions, so I should explain how I managed to avoid being consumed by it. At the time, I was taking a potent tranquilizer, lorazepam, commonly known by the brand-name Ativan, and my dosage then was three milligrams a day—roughly equivalent to thirty milligrams of Valium. My need for it had begun with a nervous breakdown a few years earlier, and I’d been taking increasing amounts of it ever since. It’s extremely effective, but highly addictive. Maturity is not a human birthright, but a matter of luck (so to speak), and not many people ever achieve it at all—very few reach it early in life. Like most valuable character traits, it must be taught from an early age, as is normal in upper-class families. I was not one of the fortunate ones. One of the principal elements of maturity, in the world as presently constituted, is considered to be a methodical, obsessive concern over money, in its numerous forms. This I have never acquired. The predictable result is that, as indicated above, I have been forever bouncing along on the bottom of the economic barrel. When this condition is combined with its natural accomplice, prolonged celibacy, true and authentic insanity is just around the corner. Trust me on that one.
Hence I had recourse to only four forms of relief from the effects of my enforced isolation: drugs, masturbation, books and food. In the best of all worlds, I would gladly dispense with the first two of those consolations, but even if I could live out the adventures I read of—expeditions and remote travel—I would still crave the company of many of the minds of writers I now pay a pittance to share. Living on little money is not as problematic as it seems—most of the world’s people do it every day. Living without love is far more damaging to the spirit, and it is a wonder to me that I have survived for so long on so little. But a life without books I find perfectly unimaginable. I know the implications of vicarious living, but I also know that if I had never learned to read, I would be a totally different person, subjectively; God knows what I would spend my time thinking about. Only when I try to conjure up such a state of mind do I even begin to sense how far removed I am from the natural conditions of the human past—before anyone could read or write. My worst moments out there were always those spent around camp, doing chores—tasks that took me away from my precious reading and were essentially solitary, tedious and menial, like so much of life itself, or the travesty we commonly make of it. Worst of all, such chores were lacking in the kind of wilderness associations that I find vaguely pleasant, like gathering firewood or building the tipi. Loneliness feeds, and feeds upon, a sense of personal shame, grounded in the conviction that the failure to attract even a single lasting partner into one’s life is the most demeaning, laughable failure of all, the butt of endless mockery among more successful men—an argument difficult to refute in my case, all things considered. There are in addition the incessant neurotic ramifications of being ashamed of merely being ashamed, etc.—the steady downward spiral of cumulative self-contempt. Many times was I reminded of—and frightened by—Milton’s famous observation that “the mind is its own place, and of itself, can make a Hell of Heaven, a Heaven of Hell.” |
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All people live for security, but not all of us recognize it in the same form. For most people today, it is money, but for better or worse, for me it has long been a view of the world more commanding than that offered by most of contemporary thought. In avoidance of ridicule, I seldom speak of it myself, but the thing I have sought, for most of my life, used to be called Enlightenment, or Wisdom.|
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