Man alone in the city

A modern city is a strange place where lonely people pass each other without notice. Sometime ago sociologist David Riesman wrote a book on the subject, with a title-diagnosis of "The Lonely Crowd". It's a common occurrence in a city to live for years in an apartment and not knowing who our neighbours are. This was impossible in a village setting. This catastrophic destruction of all connections happened in a historically incredible short amount of time - four generations, in which the village mentality of Russia became a city mentality.

We haven't had a chance to get used to it. Large families are all but gone. Each person is only related to a couple of relatives, and there's no use even beginning to talk about lonely old people or abandoned children... Instinctively people do everything in their power not to end up lonely, not to be alone with their thoughts. Better TV, better trash of "star" comedians, better soap operas, which are as identical as the conversations in queues of sick people. Better... Anything is better, as long as it takes the mind off oneself!

People are afraid of loneliness, because they feel that loneliness makes life pointless - it becomes useless. Then even the godly beauty of nature cannot save one from melancholy. According to the book 'Suicide' by Émile Durkheim, people commit suicide when all social networks are torn. Not wars or life's difficulties, not even sickness leads to it, rather above all loneliness and its ghosts. Even financially independent people are prepared to live with people they don't love, to suffer humiliations and offences, so long as they have someone nearby and feel that they're needed by someone at least. If it's not a person, then even a dog or a cat will do.

Very few people left alone with themselves are able to preserve their identity. But what about hermits who live many years in isolation? No, solitude does not mean loneliness. If it happens with the full sense of responsibility, then it actually leads to a feeling of calm and unity with the world.

This is a testament of a person who left the city and came to live on a shore of a lake, surviving on what he could get with his own hands - Henry Thoreau in the book 'Walden, or Life in the Woods': "Why should I feel lonely?...What do we want most to dwell near to? Not to many men surely, the depot, the post-office, the bar-room, the meeting-house, the school-house, the grocery, ... where men most congregate, but to the perennial source of our life, whence in all our experience we have found that to issue,..." This was written back in 19th century. Today we have polluted nature so, that finding a place which would allow us to forget about people and feel unity with nature and perennial source of life is getting increasingly difficult and it's frightening to leave our all accustomed comforts.

Cities are becoming brighter and more accommodating, apartments larger, but these are what's making those who live inside them more shallow, indifferent and one-dimensional. We're becoming smaller, proportionally opposite to the increasing population, and perhaps feeling this we don't want to increase the number of children. We have excessively more redundant words than our ancestors. Ads around us are metallically screeching above the growing void.

But the young ones are cherishing hope, and are right in doing so.

A Russian version of this article can be found here.