Christmas Eve Adam 2008

Pic of the day: Or in ether worlds, I am alone and not-alone. The two are not-two. (The picture, incidentally, will be taken two days from now.)

Loneliest night of December

Well, that's what it says, the song by Benedicte Adrian. I heard it on the clock radio one of these mornings and found it pretty, but then again I was half asleep; my music taste is subtly different then. In particular, I did not get most of the text. Actually I still haven't understood most of the text, but it seems a lot more depressive than it did that morning. Hmm, the lyrics seem not to be found anywhere online yet, and at work - where I bought it through iTunes - I could not play it loudly enough to hear them clearly. Let's see if Pirate Bay can help me. It is located in neighboring Sweden, after all. Nope, no trace of it there either, strangely. I guess she isn't all that popular after all. Oh well, the song is probably better the less you understand of the words, as is usually the case with all but the most inspired works.

Anyway, on the loneliest night of December I am probably one of the very loneliest humans in the greater Kristiansand area. Or perhaps quite the opposite. It depends on whether you believe in God or not. Or at least something suspiciously similar to God.

A few short times in my life - we are talking quarters of an hour rather than years here - I have been unable to sense the Presence, whatever or whoever it really is. I thought at the time that God has hidden himself to me, but in retrospect I believe it was a physiological problem, a temporary "blindness of the God organ" in my brain so to speak. This because it manifested together with physical symptoms and not in response to moral or religious actions (or rather immoral and irreligious, of which there have been many over the years).

The horror of that feeling - as if the very core of my being had been ripped out, leaving me to die slowly from sheer lack of life force - makes it perfectly reasonable for me to believe, as some theologians claim, that "Hell is the absence of God". Although the Bible does not really say that. It seems to say that Hell is a place of destruction, where those who have no place in the future will die beyond any means of recovery. Perhaps both is true, or perhaps both are misguided. Humans are generally not good at understanding things beyond their experience. I should know.

If that is how humans feel when they are alone, then I am amazed that they manage to keep living, in that horror and despair. But probably that is not it. Probably they still have the Presence, they are only not aware of it because they have never been without it, as was the case for me until sometime in my late teens, I think. Perhaps being lonely is more like when I'm without Internet access for a couple weeks, as has also happened. Nah, that would not be enough to drive people to do amazingly stupid things. Something else, then. Something I have no idea what is.

On the loneliest night of December, I am all alone in this world, but there are worlds above me and below me: The worlds that create us and the worlds we create. Their inhabitants are with me on this very ordinary night, as they usually are. It is actually a bit crowded here in my heart. If I could "groundhog"* this day 365 times, I would still not feel lonely, of this I feel sure. On the loneliest night of December.

(* as in the movie "Groundhog Day", in which a person re-lives the same day over and over again, every event not by themselves repeating exactly the same way. A quite thought-provoking movie, of which an online friend recently said: "I can watch it over and over.")