To: Ilaine who wrote (104320 ) 7/10/2003 4:46:33 AM From: D. Long Read Replies (2) | Respond to At the beginning of the DVD commentary for "Taxi Driver" is a quote from Thomas Wolfe's "God's Lonely Men": The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world. Pray that your loneliness may spur you into finding something to live for, great enough to die for. There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy. We're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we've never even met? "Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said. I've never found a companion as companionable as solitude. Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, Only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, Only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence. What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. Life dies inside a person when there are no others willing to be-friend him. He thus gets filled with emptiness and a non-existent sense of self-worth. When Christ said: "I was hungry and you fed me," he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger. One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it.
