I am saving my blog readers from an extensive piece on ‘We
are alone.’ I’ll just say that the Existential notion that we are alone and
hopeless is way off the mark. We are in
reality totally alone, no one could possibly have a deep understanding of any
one of us (I have written on some of the unique ways we are alone) --- given
that core reality, it is best to have an open mind an open heart and live with
the reality of aloneness comfortably.
What inspired that rant? I had been losing the community of literary thinkers, over the past decade, which nourished me. I lose friends too, often to mortality, and I find new friends. Being deeply alone is unrelated to having friends, associates, partners, family, community and compatriots. All of the latter can feel wonderful. They don’t mitigate the former.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I produced the
public radio program Social Thought, I found hundreds of thinkers to interview
by reading the New York Review of Books, the New York Times weekend Book
Review, Science magazine and a scattering of journals (that was before the
Internet.) By the late 1990s all these
sources were useless. Science was the
first to go as its political bias and tolerance for fraud became unbearable,
next to go was the NYTimes Book Review as the quality of the reviewers
declined
and the editorial rigor disappeared. The last to go was the NY Review of Books. The political bias and overt hatred of anything non-Lefty became
grotesque. In the literary world, the
source of stimulus, for me, was bleak.
So I was left with little or no literary dialog outside of the Internet.
That has changed, fortunately. First I found Commentary Magazine, then New Criterion, and most recently the Claremont Review of Books. I recommend all of these for literary and intellectual stimulus. It feels wonderful to again see a vital dialog and hold a paper copy of it in my hands.