LONELINESS

 

               

LONELINESS            

            Loneliness is today a world-wide social reality. For many ages human beings lived together as intimate neighbours, nearby companions, long-time friends, inseparable comrades and faithful helpers. Then there was hardly any friendlessness, isolation. loneliness or unfamiliarity.

            People lived together as families, bound together by actual or assumed  relationships. There were innumerable joint families and tribes.

 

            The modern age in human society is “The Age of Alienation”. As a concept it refers to “a state of disconnection from oneself, society and traditional values. “

            In a book written by the Canadian philosopher  Bernard Murchland (Born March 27, 1929) this concept  is described as “a feeling of being an outsider or “alien” to one’s surroundings, which can include a disconnect from other people, from nature, and even from oneself. “

                                                 

            Sociologically as well as philosophically, alienation has been discussed by the German philosophers Hegel (1770-1831) , Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) and Karl Marx  (1818-1883) in relation to capitalism, labour and the human condition.

            In modern literature, it is a recurring theme stating the inability of characters to connect themselves with the world around.

 

            Given below is an extract from the poem “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare (1873-1956 ). It is about silence and loneliness. The listeners in the poem are phantoms. The human protagonist is the Traveller, the purpose of whose  journey is unknown. Those who invited him have turned out to indifferent.  

 

            The poem therefore becomes an “unresolved enigma” and ends with the following words:

                        “Tell them I came, and no one answered,

                                    That I kept my word.’

            Here is the extract:

 

   

“Is there anybody there” said the Traveller,   

 

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   

   Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,   

   Above the Traveller’s head:

 

And he smote upon the door again a second time;   

   ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;  ……..

   No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,   

   Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners   

   That dwelt in the lone house then ………

………..

   

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,   

   Their stillness answering his cry, …….

 

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,   

   ’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even   

   Louder, and lifted his head:—

 

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,   

   That I kept my word,’ he said.

 

                               **********

G.R.Kanwal

5^th November 2025