Mash Up: Solidarity

Solitude: The act of being by yourself, lonely and possibly reflecting, thinking, and finding oneself.

1. I could not explain the soul-sick feeling I got underground that night, when there hadn't been an R train for forty minutes and the platform was crowded as if it were rush hour. I couldn't explain how cut off i felt, sealed in a pneumatic tube of a commute that spit me out every morning on a gray sidewalk teeming with business suits, and spit me out again at night in a peaceful, isolated, hopelessly square far Brooklyn.

2. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened.

3. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.

4. http://vimeo.com/21294655

5. But when you notice that it is vast, you should be happy; for what (you should ask yourself) would a solitude be that was not vast; there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for an kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy.... But perhaps these are the vary hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of spring.

6. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and soft chant, They is, they is, they is.

7.

8. But your own solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. All my good wishes are ready to accompany you, and faith is with you.

9. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we being, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us.

10. I am glad, in a word, that you have overcome the danger of landing in one of those professions, and are solitary and courageous, somewhere in a rugged reality. May the coming year support and strengthen you in that.

11. And sometime I also had glimmers of another thing I’d once known: how effectively information can be used to wall off emotion. How the gathering of information can take the place of actual understanding. I had built, as I am only now realizing, quite a substantial wall. As if any wall could block out those two towers.

12. I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.

13.Bon trenchantly observed that because external enemies are such spurs to group solidarity, some groups will anoint paranoid leaders because such people are expert at identifying external threats, thus generating pleasurable group solidarity even when the threats aren’t real.

14. Strangers, waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding somewhere in the night

15. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

16. And to speak of solitude again it becomes clearer that the fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from. We are solitary.

Works Cited

1. Powell, Julie. Julie & Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. New York: Little, Brown and, 2005. Print. (52)

2. Rilke, Rainer M. Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. (23)

3. Rilke, Rainer M.(8)

4. Sorgjerd, Terje. "The Aurora on Vimeo." Vimeo, Video Sharing For You. 21 Mar. 2011. Web. 22 Apr. 2011. http://vimeo.com/21294655.

5. Rilke, Rainer M. (53)

6. Wolff, Tobias. Bullet in the Brain. Print. (4)

7. "Google Images." Pharmacy Escrow. Web. 22 Apr. 2011. .

8. Rilke, Rainer M. (44)

9. Rilke, Rainer M. (62)

10. Rilke, Rainer M. (109)

11. Barrett, Andrea. The Sea of Information. Kenyon Review. Print. (17)

12. Albert Einstein (No Source)

13. Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin, 2010. Print. (164)

14. Journey. "Don't Stop Believing" Escape. Colombia, 1981. Vinyl

15. Henry David Thoreau (No Source)

16. Rilke, Rainer M. (87)