The Appeal of Lonely Places

when we imagine where in the world we’d
be happiest were often prompted to
imagine places filled with people a cozy
home with family a party with friends a
busy office or bar well lit streets
teeming with cheerful faces but defining
happy places in these terms
misses out what can be the deep appeal
of far less publicized and distinguished
sorts of environment locations that are
starkly downbeat empty melancholic
architectural II compromised and
isolated but where we nevertheless
experience a deep pull coming to fail
perhaps that we belong here
far more than in the gaiety elegance and
color of familiar vistas we may have an
instinctive sense that we are the true
natives of the isolated motorway diner
at 11:00 p.m. or of the open road under
a boundless sky in which a billion stars
are starting to appear or of dusk at the
container port or of night under the
shadow of vast electricity pylons
marching across the landscape to an
unknown city whose eerie orange aura
glows over the hill
in these lonely isolated places we have
an opportunity to meet with bits of
ourselves with which the routines of
daily life don’t allow us to commune we
are keeping an appointment with a
disavow outside of our characters and
can have internal conversations of a
sort that are drowned out by the normal
chatter the smiling and the casual
inquiries of our regular lives we are
recovering a sense of who we are turning
over memories and plans regrets and
excitements without any pressure to be
reassuring purposeful or just so-called
normal the bleakness all around is a
relief from the false comforts of home
we don’t have to pretend any longer the
environment supports us in our wish to
own up to a sadness we’ve had to hide
from for too long
the fellow Outsiders we may encounter in
these lonely places seem closer to
offering us the true community we crave
than the friends we should supposedly
rely on in their sad faces and
grief-stricken eyes we recognize the
most sincere blue used bits of ourselves
they seem like our true brothers and
sisters also unable to accommodate their
characters within the strictures of the
ordinary world outcasts and in their own
way
visionaries there can be something
almost beautiful about the ugliest kinds
of lonely places plastified brightly lit
garish shushing the lack of domesticity
the pitiless illumination and anonymous
furniture
offer a small community – ordinary
sentimentality and so-called good taste
it may be easier to give way to sadness
here than in a cozy living room with
wallpaper and framed photo
if you are defined by the places where
we feel at home some of these may have
nothing at all to do with whom leanness
as we presently conceive of the term and
yet they may comprise a trust best homes
nevertheless our wisdom display cards
explore what it really means to be wise
and how we can strive to become more enlightened in our everyday lives