March 6, 2013 by Erin

Lonely Art

We read to know we’re not alone. 

These words, uttered broodingly by a slacking and romantic Oxford undergraduate in Shadowlands, come to mind from time to time as I sit down with a new book, wondering just what it is that captivates me so. What calls me to turn the page, again and again? Why do any of us read? Why are you reading this now?

I’ve been blogging for just about ten months, and in that time I’ve written 47 posts (48 if you count this one). Some have been silly, others have been more crafted. Many have not turned out how I thought they would—the blank page turns out to be a rather surprising place. And yet, what has surprised me most has been the response from you, the reader. This blog maintains a fairly stable number of readers and commenters, mostly family and close friends who indulge my vague aspirations to become C.S. Lewis. But every so often one of my posts will get some attention, garnering social media nods and more in-person acknowledgements than normal.

Those posts that have been more popular are not the wittiest nor the most controversial, as I’d expect them to be. Surprisingly, they carry a much more melancholy tone. To be specific, the two posts that have gotten by far the most hits have been about something rather sad indeed: being alone.

I started wondering about this phenomenon after I posted “The Not Yet,” an angsty soliloquy I wrote after a hard conversation with my best friend. My follow-up post, “The Already,” was, in my opinion, a much more well-crafted piece (and more hopeful to boot), but it got less than half of the views of its sad sister-post. Then, after my soul-baring, tear-jerking Valentine’s Day post nearly broke Not Yet’s record, I saw a theme. These two posts didn’t just carry emotional honesty; they weren’t merely sad: they were lonely.

Why would people like lonely posts best, enough to read them more than once and share them with others? I think aloneness is fundamentally part of the human experience—a heart-breaking effect of the Fall. Even those of us surrounded by friends and family feel it. We’re a people cut-off, and we know it. Yet however normal this disconnection may be, we have never grown comfortable with it. We know in our bones we were made for communion, and we spend most of our lives chasing it. Art that stems from loneliness connects us to our deepest fears and longings. It connects us, in other words, to our hearts.

And here is the grand irony: it is very often those lonely works of art—the break-up song, the wistful painting, the story of loss and rejection—that make us feel, at least for a moment, less alone. Me too, our hearts whisper. I have felt that way. I have seen those things. I have been there, too. In these moments, these glimpses of eternity, art (or conversation, or even a good meal) bridges the impassable gap between souls, reminding us it will not always be so.

Yes, we read to know we’re not alone. We read, I think, to remember the life we were created for. For now we have these hints and guesses—soon we will know fully. Soon, as I said once, alone will be a fiction. Until then, we keep turning pages.

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Written with: an app that makes my keyboard sound like a typewriter, Without Words by Bethel Music.