A big green fly is buzzing angrily at the window screen. Perhaps he wants to get into the house. I go to another room and there he is again, buzzing angrily. If he were to come inside, I am sure that he would be buzzing angrily at the window screen from within, this time demanding to get out.
The green fly reminds me of ourselves. How often do we stand like a waif in our youth (more embarassingly so in later age) looking through the window inside where people chat and laugh, music drifts in the background, glasses tinkle. We want to get in, to be part of this company, to “make it” with these people who are so important, persuasive, ideal. Maybe some of us make it inside, and are lost thereafter in the many cavernous rooms of the mansion. Or some soon want to get out and can’t, not having the will or the method or the luck. We buzz or whimper to get in, and then do the same — if we get that far — to get out.
The lesson for solitaries has always been there but been hard to justify or rationalize to ourselves, let alone to others. No wonder that most solitaries, while made early in life, don’t realize or accept the nature of things until rather late in life. The break from culture and society need not be radical, but if getting out has repercussions of money, status, respectability, then it will be harder to get out than to have gotten in. Sort of like hell. And probably nobody else cares about our predicament, as the little childhood rhyme goes — and we can apply it to our big green fly: “Buzz! Buzz! Buzz! I wonder what he does.”