The question made me nervous because I didn't understand it, because I worried that he would take us off on some crazy tangent from which we could not comfortably approach the request we had brought us here. "What do you mean?"
"You don't know what I mean because you've never doubted that you're real. Sometimes I'm walking down a street, and it's like no one sees me, and I'm sure I've become invisible. Or I wake up in the night convinced there's nothing out there beyond my window, nothing at all but darkness, a vacuum, and I'm afraid to open the drapes and look, afraid I'll see a perfect emptiness, and that when I turn from the window, the room will be gone, too, and I'll cry out but won't make a sound, just float there with no sense of touch, no taste or smell, deaf and blind, the world gone as if it never was, me with no body that I can detect, no heartbeat I can feel, and yet unable to stop thinking, furiously and frantically thinking about what I don't have and what I want, about what I do have but want to be free of, about how I am nothing to anyone or anyone to me, never real and yet all these memories, these churning, insistent, hateful memories."
Despair is the abandonment of hope. Desperation is energized despair, vigorous in action, utterly reckless. He was telling me that everything he had learned from the use of guns and explosives to the German language, from the rules of law to Norwgian grammar, had been learned in desperation, as if in acquiring knowledge he would aquire substance, reality. But still he woke in the night, certain that a devouring void lay beyond his window.
He had opened a door on himself, and what I saw within him was both pitiful and terrifying.
His words revealed more than he realized. He had shown me that after the deepest self-analysis of which he was capable, he still did not understand the most important thing about himself, still lived a lie. He presented himself to me--and to himself--as one who doubted his own reality and therefore the meaning of his existence. In truth, it was the existence of the world he doubted and only himself that he believed to be real.
They call it solipsism, and even a pastry chef like me has heard of it: the theory that only the self can be proved to exist, extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings and desires. He would never be capable of seeing himself as one thread in the tapestry. He was the universe, and all the rest of us were hi fantasies, to be killed or not, as he saw fit, with no real consequences to us or to him. "
Above is a bit that I pulled from the book Life Expectancy by Dean Koontz. It's probably the best description of solipsism that I have come by in a book before.
"Solipsism is a philosophical theory that everything is in the imagination, and there is no reality outside one’s own mind. As a philosophical theory it is interesting because it is internally consistent and, therefore, cannot be disproved. But as a psychological state, it is highly uncomfortable. The whole of life becomes a long dream from which an individual can never wake up. Even friends are not real, they are a part of the dream. A person may feel very lonely and detached, and eventually becomes apathetic and indifferent."
This thread has been made to discuss this subject. Have you or anyone you know ever felt anything like this before? How do you deal with it how does he/she deal with it and how does it affect your/their life?
