But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus. – Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World

Dear Friends,

I read these lines in the closing pages of a travel memoir where the author reflects on a months-long journey by car through the Baltics, the Middle East, and central Asia. I read them several times, pulling the meaning together in fits and starts, picking words out of order until the sequence materialized and I understood them. I am steeping in these words and, before them, all the descriptions of landscapes, people, culture, calamity, sickness, and euphoria along the author’s journey. The quote matches my mood somehow, resonates with an undercurrent of nagging despair. My shoulders slump. My head hangs heavy. Maybe I’m just tired. It’s the weariness of a traveler at the end of a long, difficult journey that touched a nerve.

In the meadow, the milkweed has begun to flower. A constellation of tiny starlets radiate in orbital clusters from the stalky plant. The color, texture, and formal symmetry of the flowers appear human-made to me, like miniature plastic bits from my kids’ Lego or Playmobil toys. I look closely and brush my fingertips across the buds to confirm that they are indeed organic. Their musky aroma wafts over me and hovers in the walking path. It’s just before dusk and a band of gold paints the ridge of the hills flanking this place on the eastern edge.

I’m thinking about a not-quite poem I penned a few weeks ago. The word “apart” opens and closes a dozen or so lines describing a forest shot through with morning sunlight, illuminating patches of emerald green. Later, I typed the poem out, thinking it might be worthwhile, and felt disappointed with how flimsy the words presented on the screen. Better they remain scrawled in my sketchbook, contextualized by collages and blind contour drawings and abstract doodles. But that word “apart” lingers in my mind like the bite of a black fly that itches for weeks. Strange, its hold on me, for all my stubborn belief in the essential interconnection of things binding us together. And now I am worriedly thinking about Hannah Arrendt’s analysis of how fascism takes hold, of how loneliness and isolation alienate us from each other, from ourselves, until the resulting apathy opens a door to totalitarian manipulation. That apartness seems both seductive and terrifying.

Or, perhaps there is something fundamental about the apartness because of the limitations of human perceptions, cognition, and consciousness. That I will never fully understand any other living entity, will never experience what they experience, will never truly know another’s thoughts and feelings. I am apart, and no heightened powers of empathy or communication or intuition will bridge the vast gap between me and everything not-me. I see this apartness as another dimension of Bouvier’s “central inadequacy of soul”, an inevitable constraint which we must learn to acknowledge and overcome, like the exhaustion of a journey in the final moments before returning home.

In hopeful solidarity,

Jeremy