Saturday, January 25, 2014

Robinson Crusoe's Audience


I’ve been listening to Robinson Crusoe on audio book. Despite being the child of an English Professor who loved literature, I missed reading most of the classics. It wasn’t because I didn’t like to read. I did like it. I read all the time – generally three or four books a week. Just not the classics. Now, approaching my sixth decade, I am trying to rectify that gap in my schooling. Using new technology, of course, with my ears instead of my eyes.

This Robinson Crusoe book… it’s a good story, and it gives me so much to consider. Basically it’s the tale of a man in the 1600’s who is shipwrecked on a deserted island, the only survivor. Aside from a few provisions he is able to save from the ship, he must make do with what the island provides.

Apart from shelter, food and safety, the thing I ponder most is how he is able to live for so many years without anyone to talk with. As a near lifetime consumer of talk therapy, I can only imagine being reduced to some kind of insanity. I completely understand Tom Hanks’ (Cast Away) need to have a companion, if only a face on a volleyball he called Wilson.

For a time, Crusoe has a talking parrot. He has a dog and some cats but doesn’t describe these as the intimate companions I find them to be. He tames goats but only to assure the availability of food. His sole companion, Man Friday, doesn’t appear until Crusoe’s been on the island for 24 years!

I do like my solitude, tend to avoid the phone and chance encounters with friends and acquaintances, but at 11 o’clock on Tuesday, I want someone to listen to me. I want to be heard, known, validated. Therapy, though, is a contrived relationship, rarely paralleled in real life. In Crusoe’s place, would I have engineered a companion? An imaginary friend? I rather think I would.

In a very real way, Crusoe does have a listener. He writes. He speaks of a reader, though who would that be on a deserted island? This I understand. Most of the time, I write to a reader. Not always someone known to me, but indeed some type of imagined audience,  even if I don’t have one.

So Gentle Reader, thank-you for stopping by. Thank-you for taking time to read my words, for helping me not be stranded on a deserted island.  And, especially to those of you who have commented, thank-you for letting me know I have been heard.

Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.  -Honoré de Balzac

Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.  -Graham Greene, Ways Of Escape

Thanks

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