Monday, May 08, 2006

THE HAPPY RECLUSE?

With each passing day, life is bound to push me further along the road of disillusionment with humanity.

I just hope I'm not bitter when I finally decide to lock myself away from the rest of the world, a la Howard Hughes, JD Salinger and that crazy woman who lived next door to us when I was a kid (she did occasionally stick her head out long enough to tell me and the other kids running up and down the hallway to shut the hell up; I wish she'd been truer to the code of the recluse, because that momentary appearance couldn't possibly be acceptable...not in my rule book anyway!). Is it possible to be a gay (I mean the other definition of the word, ie, happy, merry, lively) recluse? Gosh, I hope so.

7 comments:

Nefertiti said...

it's possible...i go in my cave sometimes, not because i'm depressed or anything but because i'm in my own world handling stuff. like now...

i'll be in NYC soon. would love to meet up.

=)

Richie said...

How can you be disillusioned with humanity -- I shall not believe it of you, love. But being a recluse is much different from disillusionment, I think. It is reveling in life but from a distance, which is not wrong. One can explore all life has to offer, as Kafka and Dickinson said, without ever even leaving one's room. Or to loafe and invite one's soul, as Whitman did. Or, as my friend (and once neighbor of a different time) Samuel Johnson wrote, that nothing is little to he who feels it with great sensibility. Or Wordsworth: that the world is too much with us. Which is why we retire to our rooms with too much humanity, too much of what is there in all its imperfect splendor, and there have enough to sustain us.

Aero said...

The funny thing about disillusionment with humanity is that it has a way of disappearing when you encounter some humans that replenish your hope in the compassion and honest goodness that many people still have within them.

And plus, a true recluse wouldn't be online and I doubt any of us bloggers can give that up so easily :)

Anonymous said...

r.arlington - you really can dish out the pseudo-intellectual blather very well. Kudos.

[adventures.in.anonymity] said...

it can be done. i've been a recluse for years. and look how i turned out.

the moral of the story: don't do it!

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