And this is the truly terrible thing--that we are incapable of anything but absolute aloneness.
For if you exist with other people, you can only communicate with them indirectly--through language, touch, music, etc. And if you could communicate with them directly--if you could directly contact another person's thoughts--well then, you would no longer feel like separate people, just as you feel like one person even though your brain is in two halves, connected by only the corpus callosum. You would be all by yourself again--utterly alone.
Sometimes I think what we truly want is experience without responsibility. Imagine if things just happened, and you had no control over them, little investment in them. Pleasure would be nice; pain would be not so nice but free from guilt and self-pity. You could accomplish this by "hitching a ride" in someone's head, temporarily. I feel like that is the desire underlying some romantic relationships. It is certainly a reason why people play video games.
What would it feel like to die, then?
When I imagine it now, it does not feel so bad. But perhaps I am repressing the fear (as most of us do throughout our everyday lives).
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