226 How distant everything is!

“There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.”
“We are so isolated from everything! But isn’t everything equally inaccessible to us?”
– E.M.Cioran from How Distant Everything Is!, On the Heights of Despair

How Distant Everything Is! is one of my favorite chapter in Cioran’s On the Heights of Despair. The first time I read it, its explosive use of vocabulary moved me to a point that I was almost bursting into tears… of course I have no tears since 13… Then I didn’t understand what the author meant when he wrote down “distant”, “isolated” and “inaccessible”. Recently I skimmed through his biography (Searching for Cioran) and found the following paragraph that is equally touching:

Never before had his loneliness and his poverty weighed so heavy on young Emil as when he looked from his library window at the happy, careless world of the boulevards below, so close yet so inaccessible to him. To make matters worse, like all adolescents endowed with a robust nature, he was beset by a powerful sexual drive which had no outlet. The unappeased flesh tortured and humiliated him. Friendless and penniless in the alien city, what was he to do? Who would want him in his thread- bare suit, with his threatening expression, his small body? Certainly not the elegant city girls parading on the boulevard; even the prostitutes thereabouts were much too expensive for him. Only a servant girl might be willing to be taken to the theatre or an exhibition. He had not forgotten the Cella incident and once again solemnly renounced all frivolities, flirting, and amorous adventures, throwing himself into his reading with redoubled, pent-up energy.

Reading through this, I couldn’t help citing from How again: “We are so closed to each other!” So everyone can guess that here begins my story, but my story is a paradoxical term. My story is a non-story: Nothing really happens; nothing really matters. I am living like a ghost, having left no trails, shed no tears, broken no hearts… The defining incidence happened like this:

Weeks before the university entrance exam, on an afternoon, this one friend of mine and I were leaving school with a girl. We separated before the school gate. I was walking home, and they took the sub-way. Months later, I happened to know that they kissed in the train station. Considering that I was also interested in the same girl, this is a perfect experience of “so closed yet so inaccessible”. My life is just like that, but does it even qualify as life? I am on the fringe of everything.

WT told me that he is afraid his life would be fixed as he is working at a nuclear power plant and has remote prospect of a job change. I said more or less I have the same feeling. All these years I have been seeing my possibilities closed one after another. Recent experiences lead to the loss of all my hopes. There are not much things I can do now so I would just like to devote most of my energy to just one thing, to read all I can read, just for my curiosity.