I have often been 'sentenced' as a narcissist, isolationist and disconnected. But is the idea of a private stronghold against a hostile, mechanised modern world entirely dismissable? Withdrawal into the self isn't necessarily ought to be an isolating pathology; it could provide essential strength and sustain one's original nature. We all seek a bit of love and fame but most of us will slip through their embrace in our lifetime. Wasn't it Rilke who once said that fame is the sum of misunderstandings that accrue around a name?
The idea of individuality is the intellectual passion here: individuality either as an element against impersonal forces or as portal to a more meaningful life. Yet this type of thinking is often accused of being grandiose, obsessional and linked to some form of inadequacy. An experience becomes real only when identified and shared it by giving it a name, the impossibility of having an experience and making sense of it in words at the same time torments most of us. We all want to live out dramatic thinking. We are all searching for the in-discoverable place where words and experience are one.
Yes, of course I isolate. The desire to be elsewhere presented itself literally at the moment of birth,on that fateful day of red-faced weeping and vulnerability. Growing up in a middle-class Indian family in Bengal, only inflamed this inborn yearning for flight. Why had this place become the symbol of not living to me, so that I had to get out or die? Then my inner gallop to Delhi, Paris, London. Yet instead of transformation, I found myself ducking a boomeranging self: during all the years I lived abroad, I had almost daily flashes of the fish-pond where my brother and I went fishing in the summer afternoons in Bengal. New experiences seemed to arrive with my name already on them. Torrid love affairs, a marriage to a beautiful Frenchwoman,travelling all over Europe and North America — none of this satisfied the avid, restless moi. I couldn't ever get far enough away, because I couldn't become someone else. The anxiety that I was not fully living returned to haunt me time and time again. Yet wherever I travelled I had taken my world with me, as a double of worries and longings.
I probably live too much on ideas and find it hard to separate this from experiences. May be in our mortal death we become fuller persons, more empathetic, productive and eloquent. But ideas and death occupy two opposite sides of nothingness. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, the process of dying consummates our preternatural abstractness.

The big freeze continues, just a quiet, cold day.