I USED TO READ AT PARTIES

 " ... and I use 'recognize' in the philosopher Plato's very particular sense that we recognize the truth when we encounter it, rather than have to discover or learn it."

— Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space

I have certainly experienced that physical shock of recognition, which is usually accompanied by sorrow and dread or at least disappointment that one can no longer lie or deny some truth. 

"... inwardness was always tensional and — as Byron saw by invoking Lucifer — it was not so much the path to inner peace as providing a new area of conflict."

— Stephen Prickett, Secret Selves: A History of Our Inner Space

Yeah, that inner space of near constant conflict if self-recrimination can be thought of as conflict. 

Later ...

That's what happens when I start reading again. Things jump out at me.

I haven't really been able to articulate my general senses that dread, truth, loneliness, reality, and regret are woven in some kind of net around me. It all pierces so much ... I am mixing my metaphors here but I already warned you that I am not particularly close to any reasonable explication here.

Not only do I feel my own loneliness and detachment from the bigger river of activity, I feel for my mother in her horrible arthritic pain, loss of sight, loss of memory, loss of really appropriate friends (she is still stewing over Joseph and the puppy) ... and having to live with someone who doesn't want to be here and can be short-tempered. And then the other stuff of the country falling apart. And the pandemic. 

There was a review or rather a musing about the HBO remake of Bergman's Scenes from A Marriage. 

"It is a profound insight on Bergman’s part to notice that loneliness involves a detachment not only from other people but from reality in general. As a child, I had trouble forming friendships, and turned instead to fantasy. I could imagine myself into the books I read and, by embellishing the characters, supply myself with precisely the sorts of friends that I’d always longed for. If you have engaged in this kind of fantasizing, you know that the thrill of creativity eventually collapses into a feeling of emptiness. This is the moment when loneliness hits. You’ve prepared yourself an elaborate psychological meal, and you realize, belatedly, that it can never sate your real hunger.

One is often loneliest in the presence of others because their indifference throws the futility of one’s efforts at self-sustenance into relief. (If you spend a party reading in a corner, you come to see, no matter how good the book, that you are not fooling anyone.)"

— Agnes Collard, The Problem of Marital Loneliness, NY'er 9/25/21

(I used to read at parties because I didn't want to really participate or couldn't find the correct engagement. Or I really couldn't put down the book.)

I don't know where this leads. Another day, another foot in front of the other, more dread, more feeling that I am caught in a continued wince of existential pain. I really could use some relief so that maybe I could turn some energy around and maybe get productive here or there. 

That's it. The above is where my better self is thinking, trying to feel it enough to express it in more than phrases and quotations.