Прекрасный мир, где же ты

Даже когда пишу это письмо, чувствую себя какой-то разобранной, диссоциативной. У Рильке есть стихотворение, которое заканчивается так: «Кто и теперь один, и без угла, / тот будет знать всегда одни скитанья; / тот будет каждой ночью, досветла, / писать кому-то длинные посланья, – / и проходить в аллеях, средь молчанья, / где буря много листьев намела». Лучшего описания моего нынешнего состояния и не придумать, за исключением того, что сейчас апрель и буря листьев не наметает. Прости за «длинное посланье».

True, no one is looking down on you all from a height. But it gives the sky a position of total dominance. Nowhere is the sky meaningfully punctuated or broken up by anything at all. The Spire, you might point out, and I will concede the Spire, which is anyway the narrowest possible of interruptions, and dangles like a measuring tape to demonstrate the diminutive size of every other edifice around. The totalising effect of the sky is bad for people there.
Nothing ever intervenes to block the thing from view. It’s like a memento mori.

In public I'm always taking about care ethics and the value of human community, but in my real life I don't take on the work of caring for anyone except myself. Who in the world relies on me for anything? No one. I can blame myself, and I do, but I also think the failure is general. People our age used to get married and have children and conduct love affairs, and now everyone is still single at thirty and lives with housemates they never see. Traditional marriage was obviously not fit for purpose, and almost ubiquitously ended in one kind of failure or another, but at least it was an effort at something, and not just a sad sterile foreclosure on the possibility of life. Of course if we all stay alone and practice celibacy and carefully police our personal boundaries, many problems will be avoided, but it seems we will also have almost nothing left that makes life worthwhile. I guess you could say the old ways of being together were wrong — they were! — and that we didn't want to repeat old mistakes — we didn't. But when we tore down what confined us, what did we have in mind to replace it? I offer no defence of coercive heterosexual monogamy, except that it was at least a way of doing things, a way of seeing life through. What do we have now? Instead? Nothing. And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.