Writing enables us to make deep connections

There is a yearning in us — in me I should say, but I’ll stick with the presumption of “us”

— for closeness. A closeness so true we might be able to stave off loneliness if not permanently, for long enough to forget its concept entirely.

We humans write poems, make love, play music, hold hands, drink beer, watch movies. All red herrings from the core desire: To find a semblance of connection. From Plato’s “The Symposium” to Louise Glück’s “Telescope,” the plurality of writing captures both our desire to connect and becomes a vehicle for connection with one another and the larger world.

In Plato’s “The Symposium,” Aristophanes’ tells a tale of the original humans attempt to overthrow the gods. After their failed attempt, Zeus knows the gods can’t destroy the humans for the gods need the humans’ “honors and sacrifices.” Yet, he also knows the contempt of the original humans’ needs to be punished. Aristophanes describes original humans as being of both sexes and Zeus realizing this thinks of no better punishment then splitting them into two:

“Now when their nature was divided in two, each half in longing rushed to the other half and they threw their arms around each other and intertwined them, desiring to grow together into one, dying of hunger and inactivity too because they were unwilling to do anything apart from one another … Each of us then is but a token of a human being .. two from one; each then ever seeks his matching token.”

This yearning to connect, to find our “matching token,” can be traced back millennia. It is a part of our origin. It is a trait that has plagued us from the beginning. Not only does Aristophanes’ speech provide a vehicle to explain this longing deep within us for closeness, but it also creates an opportunity of deeper understanding of one another’s intrinsic needs.

A few millennia later, no other than Louise Glück does a perfect job capturing our continued desire for closeness. Glück’s poem, “Telescope,” reveals one’s yearning for closeness doesn’t always involve finding one’s “other half,” instead it could manifest as a yearning to belong to something greater:

“There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you’ve been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.

You’re in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in body.

You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.

At night, on the cold hill, taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. You see again how far away every thing is from every other thing.”

While peering into the night sky, the speaker experiences a connection so deep they become one with the bodies of the stars, “You’re not a creature in a body. / You exist as the stars exist, / participating in their stillness, their immensity.”

The speaker experiences a moment of communion, a moment of true unity.

As suddenly as this feeling came upon the speaker, the connection is severed just as quickly, “Then you’re in the world again. / At night, on the cold hill, / taking the telescope apart.” The speaker in this poem is in search of a connection to something greater and momentarily attains it. But the speaker quickly feels the hollowness of the severance — the way a hand feels colder than the rest of the body after a lover lets it go, “You see again how far away / every thing is from every other thing.”

Glück elegantly captures the acute sense of disconnection after one finds a moment of wholeness, recalling the original humans “desire to grow together” post-severance, again placing both the reader and the speaker at the start of their search.

Through the gaze of the speaker, “Telescope” pulls the reader into the heavens and along their tumultuous journey of communion and disconnection. It also reveals a great metaphor for the unique power of writing. Writing is itself a telescope. From Aristophanes’ tale of the original humans to the moment of birth, where we suffer from the ultimate disconnection, we’re in constant search for connection. To meet this end, writing becomes one of the ultimate vehicles to articulate our yearning for connection while allowing us to craft and discover brief moments of deep connection like one experiences alongside the speaker in “Telescope.”