The following is an excerpt from my upcoming novella, Solitude and Its Enemies. It is part of a trio of (unrelated) novellas that will be published simultaneously. Some time soon.
Maybe you’ve seen him. Dressed plainly in all black. He walks in public with a book in his hands, held open before his face. (It is not easy to read and walk at the same time—you’ve got to look out for obstacles—but you can tell by the finesse with which he reads and walks, walks and reads, that he has been practicing for a long time.) He prefers books to people; that is, he prefers the creamy page with its rows of black text to the faces of his fellow men and women.
So ghastly, those faces benighted by worry and toil. Like gargoyles! Not that he fears them. He has merely had his fill. His only speakable desire is to be alone—apart. He hopes never to have to speak to a living human being again. His life, at its current stage, is an experiment in gradual separation. And with the technologies of his day (no need to list them here), it is not a difficult experiment to run.
You could chastise a man of this disposition for living in such a bustling city—why doesn’t he move out to the boondocks, where there are no neighbors to loathe or against whom to jostle as he walks?! And if you could somehow manipulate him into divulging the secret of his apparent reticence to leave the city—which is actually a flat-out refusal—he might reveal that it is his discreet pleasure to jostle against the thick flow of strangers without ever interacting with a single one of them: without even making eye contact for a second! Yes, he said, “pleasure.” You did not mishear him, nor did he misspeak. You could be forgiven for assuming that such a man—dressed plainly in all black, with that grim cast to his unmoving face—was averse to pleasure of the usual kind. But no. He takes the utmost pleasure in the first sip of coffee, the first light of sunrise, the first-turning leaves of autumn, and in the occasional proximity to such a density of fellow men and women whom he regards, generally speaking, as unworthy of the air they’re sucking up as they bustle to and fro.
Is he worthy of the air that he himself sucks up? That is hardly for him to say. (Probably not.) He knows only that what Cioran would call the temptation to exist is a trap and that those who fall into it are fools. Pathétique! Look at them, starring in the scenes of their lives as if anyone were watching! How vulgar!! To look at them instead of the pages of his books fills him with displeasure. And this displeasure, he has found, in the paradox of human inanity, as it turns out, is actually the height of all possible pleasures. For instance: To spend a whole week indoors seeing and speaking to no one—and then to go out to the street and suddenly, brutally, come face to face with humanity by the hundreds. Just imagine the jolt.
You’ll spot this man sitting of an afternoon out on a café patio with a book in his lap and a latte, sipping and ogling the throngs of human passersby (read a page, ogle, read a page, ogle), his wan face clenched with disgust, his heart leaking acid into his brain, thinking to himself that they could all just fall down dead on the pavement this very second and nothing would be lost. In theory, nothing would make him happier than to watch them all fall down dead. But since this is extremely unlikely to happen, he must content himself with the highly pleasurable displeasure of just sharing space with those whom he hates the most: everyone!
Why draw your attention to him at all, you ask, when surely anyone else would deserve it more? Even we are not sure. Something about him trips us up. We’ve skimmed the lives of countless millions of human beings, in disjointed fragments—most of them caught unbeknownst to them on surveillance devices in the street, in the shops, and in their homes (devices they love and cherish for the amount of labor they subtract from the average life)—and there is consensus among us: This one stands out. Something about the purity of his asceticism and polite misanthropy—the unmiserable rhythm of his days, spent living like a man alone on an island surrounded by a sea of living bodies and faces.
You watch and you wait. Because you know: If something of note, something categorically unexpected, were to befall this man—if something were to happen—he would be crushed; and only when crushed does a man’s radiant juice of glory spill out into the world (as often in a barrage of raw poetry as in an indiscriminate spray of bullets).