“Solitude,” wrote Mexican poet Octavio Paz, “is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows that he is alone.”
Man is alone, Paz claims. Do you agree? Can we reach out to another person through all the things that separate us? Or are we left to face the cold, cruel world by ourselves?
In my limited understanding of Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf basically says that human beings can’t communicate with one another, that words fail us all the time. Sometimes we can reach across to another person and empathize with them, but usually we can’t. This isn’t a happy thought, but I think it’s accurate.
Think about how difficult it is to communicate with someone else (and see Kel Thompson’s March 17 column for a helpful discussion of communication). Our primary means of communication with one another, language, fails us constantly. Not only do languages vary across the world, but meanings of words vary within a single language, especially in English. Whether due to individual vocabulary deficiencies or because of the complexity of the language itself, there is no guarantee that two people conversing in English have the same understanding of the words each is using. How many people in the modern U.S. know what “paramour” means? I came across it recently and had only a vague idea that it meant something more than “lover.” According to the dictionary, it could mean either “illicit lover in the adulterous sense” or “darling, sweetheart”: to me there’s a huge difference between the two meanings. I had to use the word’s context to determine which sense the author meant.
Consider Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” (and, yes, I recently saw the new “Alice in Wonderland”): Carroll invented phrases like “manxome foe,” “uffish thought,” “whiffling through the tulgey wood.” Carroll makes obvious what we usually ignore, that in all likelihood what I mean and what you hear (or read) are two very different things, and that this problem can’t necessarily be remedied by careful word choice.
Or take one of the running jokes on the TV show “Friends,” in which the character Joey picks up women by asking “How you doing?” If the phrase is taken at face value, one would assume that Joey is inquiring after their well-being. But the manner in which Joey asks his question causes the women, in light of the cultural understanding they share, to giggle and blush. Joey pauses, looks a woman up and down, and asks in a tone both appreciative and suggestive, “How YOU doin’?” A shared understanding about relationships between men and women, and the intent behind such a remark, conveys Joey’s meaning, not his words or tone alone. What would happen, I wonder, if Joey tried the same pick-up line on a woman whose culture hadn’t fostered such sexual openness? Would she take Joey’s action as a compliment or an insult?
Our lived experiences impact how we communicate with one another just as much as our understandings of language do. Each of us absorbs and processes various stimuli of our environments differently. We are bombarded with infinite amounts of stimuli, but to remain sane only ever register a few: what I overlook, you might focus on, and thus our understandings of the world differ.
We can know a person truly, know who they are, but we can never know everything that went into shaping them into that person. We will always miss something, and they will always miss something about us. For that reason, because so many little details that are part of our lives, but impossible to explain, will only ever be known to us — we are alone.
This, for me, is one of the reasons we study the humanities, because although we are each of us alone, at times we can find sympathy in literature, art and philosophy: for some things are common to all human beings. At times, despite the difficulties, we can bridge the gap that separates us, and cry with relief as Virgil’s Aeneas does, that, “here, too, there is just reward for merit, there are tears for suffering and men’s hearts are touched by what man has to bear.” We are alone, yes, but we have that in common, and sometimes sympathy with another can break through solitude.
— Leigh Dickey is a junior in global studies. She can be reached at [email protected].
