Loneliness and the Sun: Woman, “Languageing” and Loneliness in Menis Koumandareas’s Koula and Selma Lagerlof’s “The Eclipse” What are the features of those fictional writings that deal with loneliness? If we believe, as Husserl did, that consciousness is always intentional, then loneliness must be something unbearable for humankind. However, there are a thousand modes of loneliness, and a thousand modes of being in company. A tree may be a truer friend for me than a fellow human being, but that kind of friendship is not interpretable in terms of an anthropocratic analysis of “consciousness”. Again, however close one may be to a tree or to the stars which have no “speech”, one has to come back to the human world, if one wants to do literature. …show more content…
And it is from this structure of feeling, which characterizes our impulse of endless “languageing” as a perennial orientation towards the narratable selves of our necessary others, that the fictional writing on loneliness grows. Fictionalizing loneliness is not easy – no crude sentimentalism of “I am so lonely” would help one produce good fiction on loneliness. The fiction of loneliness which is truly worthy of its name is based on the multiplicity of our necessary others, and the complex network of our desires to communicate with all of them, while we know jolly well that the same kind of “languageing” is not sufficient for communicating with and about each of them. If you have no human friends, you may find solace in the company of nature, but that company will produce an urge for languageing in you which won’t be satisfied until you have returned to the human world. On the other hand, troubled by the loneliness intensified by joyless conversations with a crowd of “friends” in your human circle, you may seek for true/mystic companionship in a tree or in the grass beneath your feet, but your languageing self will not find itself narrated (or reciprocally