No One to Fistfight With

The problem with the statement "No one is alone," is that it is not completely true.

In some ways we are not. In some, we are interconnected, web-like paths of jittery atoms, striking chain-reactions across probability... nothing I do exists in a vacuum.

In others, we are solitary suspentions of consciousness -- limited by the fact that everything we do, we do as the result of a choice; and each choice, no matter what the motivation, or awareness of what the process is, still remains completely independent: everything I do is a lonely action.

One of my favorite quotes is from London Fields by Martin Amis:

One of those people who should never drink anything at all, Nicola drank a very great deal. But it depended. A couple of mornings a month, stiff with pride, deafened with aspirin (and reckless with Bloody Marys), Nicola would adumbrate serious reform: for example, only two collassal cocktails before dinner, a broad maximum of half a bottle of wine with her meal, and then just one whisky or digestif before bedtime. She would frequently stick to the new regime right up to and certainly including he whisky or digestif before bedtime the following day. By then, bedtime looked a long way off. There was always a lot of shouting and fistfighting to do before bedtime. And what about after bedtime, or after the first bedtime, with several bouts of one thing or another still to go? So she always failed. She could see herself failing (there she was, clearly failing), and so she failed. Did Nicola Six drink alone? Yes, she drank alone. You bet. And why did she drink alone? Because she was alone. And she was alone, now, at night, more than formerly. What could never be endured, it turned out, was the last swathe of time before sleep came, the path from larger day to huger night, a little death when the mind was still alive and fluttering. Thus the glass banged down on the round table; the supposedly odourless ashtray gave its last weak swirl; and then the babywalk, the smudged trend to the loathed bedding. That was how it had to end.

Ah. It's funny because it's true.


Goodnight.