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While language is imperfect and especially irritating to anyone who wishes to be properly understood, the inability to communicate with anyone easily drives even the soundest minds to madness. Lack of communication breeds loneliness, isolation, paranoia, hatred, anger, and more things that I can’t think of. When you first discover the failure of language you might find yourself, like I often do, wishing to simply never engage in language ever again, and keep your thoughts to yourself, because at least I’LL be able to understand them. But that just causes more problems. Isolation destroys a man. Completely erases him. Influence from other people has an effect as well, but isolation completely replaces the circuit board in the hard drive, so to speak. So don’t go mute. Tempting as it might seem at first. If one attempts this even for a short period, especially after vocalizing themselves on a frequent basis, they will break under the pressure of their own thoughts. They don’t have to be particularly fascinating or important. People naturally want to attempt to make themselves known. I believe this is precisely because we lack the perfect understanding from before the fall. But that doesn’t mean that you can avoid the imperfections of language, or of your own social ability, or of your own ability to pick and choose the best words for a given topic or thought.
Loneliness creeps in on one day or another. When you feel as if you’ve been thinking aloud for ages, but nobody hears, or maybe they do, but they don’t care. When you realize you are miles from having a friendship like you used to have, or a romantic relationship like you may or may not have had, or a parental one. The struggle of loneliness is a cross. A struggle for the benefit of the soul. Which inherently means it’s difficult. What’s the point of there being a struggle if it’s easy? I wish to emphasize the difficulty of it because it highlights how unnatural of a state it is for a human being. Yet you’re in it. Or have been in it at some point. The striving, reaching pain of the heart aches for someone, something, to grab hold and never let go. But it doesn’t come, at least not immediately. Maybe you’d prefer the metaphor about a gaping hole in your chest. Either way, it’s not a pleasant feeling. I think that the natural reaction to this sort of anguish is to speak. And it’s done without caring that whoever hears won’t *really* get it, because the desperation of the situation is too dire to beg for perfection. Loneliness is a lack of the basics of communication between two people. Even when you do speak to people, if you feel like they do not understand what you are saying by even a single iota, this will result in loneliness as well. Isolation is prolonged loneliness. I would say most who experience this would describe their loneliness as belonging to the latter category just described. A prolonged stay in this state of mind will turn you into a monster. Or maybe not a monster, but completely unrecognizable as a rational person.
I will now talk about visual novels in a semi-serious writing. In muvluv alternative, towards the end of the game, Takeru begins to refer to Meiya as his “guiding light” as it is translated in the steam version. After conzulting with an expert I discovered that in the original Japanese what he actually calls her is “尊い存在(pronounced toutoi sonzai) which is more accurately translated as something like “special existence” or “noble conzfidant.” Why bring this up? Because I believe that the relationship that Takeru had with Meiya at that time is something that every person really needs. Somebody to bounce ideas off of and receive advice from. Somebody who, while they may not be able to understand everything, will at least be able to understand something. And the communication in itself is important as a means of stabilization and grounding to reality. The mere act of a conversation where you can feel like someone is trying to understand what you’re saying anchors you to reality and to the person you’re speaking with. Christian confession is sort of like this but isn’t really sufficient in itself to satisfy the conztant need human beings have for communication. Nor is only speaking to other people on one day of the week. Unfortunately, many do not have a noble conzfidant. Or many people to communicate to at all. Everyone they might have in their life either doesn’t really listen to them or is only talking to them at all out of necessity. A hopeless situation indeed. I can’t really say anything other than people should be more friendly and attempt to form deeper and more connected relationships with people.
SKASHI. Many people simply assume they have this relationship with other people without actually having it. This results in them dumping their issues on someone who doesn’t want to hear it, and only offers worthless platitudes. Yet, due to the cathartic feeling one gets from talking about themselves, it’s possible for the person doing the complaining to never notice that nobody cares about what they’re talking about, which leads to them being conzfused when nobody wants to listen to them talk anymore. Even if you DO have a noble conzfidant, if you overuse that relationship to where the majority of the time you spend together is just whining about whatever it is that’s currently annoying you, the same thing will happen, but it will be more destructive as the bond between the two of you was strong. Once again muvluv talks about this. As I recall (I read this vn almost a year ago), Meiya tells Takeru to shut the hell up and just be normal on more than one occasion. Shut the hell up and just be normal. Pretty good advice. Something I noticed with this is that people are really quick to say that they’re “there if you need to talk” which is just an outright lie. I’m pretty sure they know it’s a lie, too. I don’t really get that.
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