One Hundred Years of Solitude on an unGodly Earth – part 1: the existential loneliness

Caution – I have not penned an ode to Gabriel García Márquez’ downright magnum opus (if you wish me to soft-soap this tremendous author in an abundance of superlatives, I’d gladly be your guest). Before you send me to the gallows, I might be able to offer you a Mad Tea Party as a substitute. The guest list consists of Alice, Frankenstein, and later on Brave New World’s cast and Nietzsche will join us. Caution again – a certain Hatter and March Hare are not invited to this kind of tea party.

I am in love with humans. With their toes, their bitten-off nails, their pellucid tears, baked in the sun, the veins of spilled ink pulsing on their lips and fingers, the sandflakes falling from the folds of their eyes as a token of the wakeful nights in which they howled for their lovers, their oddities, their endeavours, in the end reduced to ashes, and their flaws, oh, of all, their flaws. Notwithstanding my deepest affections for them, I feel estranged from these humans, the whole lot of them together as well as humans as individual beings. If truth be told, I could not resist the title of Colombia’s metaphorical, magical chronicle, as it fits my life like a glove.

[ Insert Simon&Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence ]

On the one hand, as soon as I get to know a human being, I want to fathom them out to the core, peeling off cover after cover we have learnt to veil ourselves in. No small talk, it simply doesn’t work for me. However, as we áre human beings, we cringe from our own nakedness, Adam and Eve having dined on ruby-red forbidden fruit, from opening up to each other. And even as we get this far, as I am craving to unfold myself as a human, my language deserts me, and I cannot reconcile this human in my soul – I do hold that we have a soul –, all winging words and emotions, with the person I am amongst all these humans on this earth.

On the other hand, while I get encircled by more and more people, all winsome and superb and wreaking havoc on the earth and themselves at the same time, I cannot help but feeling isolated, utterly on my own. When I, at long last, started to discern this living world for what it truly is, I holed my chest, somewhere where my heart should be pulsating, and the more human beings I drink in, in an attempt to fill up this gaping pit, the more this abandonment seems to close in on me. And, I dare say, I am not the sole one. All of us have come on the scene of this Mad Tea Party, three lumps of sugar, if you please, as Alice, trapped in isolation. In order to figure out what this life is for, we have wandered off to this entrancing, extraordinary place called Wonderland, overcrowded with riddles we cannot make heads or tails of and its odd inhabitants, human beings, we cannot be in tune with.

‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.’

Moreover, as I grow older, I begin to identify, to an increasing extent, with this sad creature the scientist Frankenstein gave life to. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is not half as much bloody entrails hurling through the air and banqueting on souls as most of us would guess (for something like that, I’d love to refer you to my dearest heads-and-legs-catapulting series Game of Thrones), and trust me, my life is way too grey for that. As it happens, this creature is merely an experiment-gone-wrong, designed to be the homo optimus, Darwin’s legacy taken to the next level, but it met with disaster and transformed into a grotesque, deformed being – a pretext for the ‘ordinary’ human being to deem him a monstrosity and exile him from society, from mankind.

However, the Creature (his creator, whose actual name is Frankenstein, withholding him a name of his own), exceedingly erudite and warm-hearted, eyes humans from afar, as he falls in love with them, wishing upon the stars to blend in with them, but, due to his misshapenness, ultimately fails to bond with other humans. Have you never tasted this kind of alienation? Do you never fancy standing alongside this Creature as you look and love the rest from afar, being smothered by existential loneliness in the pit of your chest?

High and dry, the Creature of Frankenstein betakes himself to the tempestuous, snowy mountains, which not solely echo his detached state of being, but, more importantly, bring him peace. In the same manner, I flee from Wonderland, to the forests, or, ideally, to the untamed, storm-tossed, ravishing sea, its foaming waves calling for me as they break upon the solid rocks. And when they break, the waves seem to flush away the doubts – the Hookah-Smooking Caterpillar bellowing ‘WHO ARE YOU?’ – for calmness, the estrangement from these odd other beings surrounding me – the playing cards painting the roses red – for love of people. In nature, I am free, I am at peace. And due to nature sweeping this existential loneliness for a while, I can find my way back to the rabbit-hole and all these lovely humans inhabiting this earth.

However, we are whirling and twirling on the music of the 21^st Century, on the surface of not merely the earth, but an unGodly earth. ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche is trumpeting. Welcome to a Brave New World. What this unGodly earth might and might not entail for us, existential loners, and our Frankensteinish peace in nature, I will disclose over the next cup of tea in the week to come. Thus, stay tuned.