Martin Re-read: "The Second Kind of Loneliness"

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Read the next entry in this series here.

“The Second Kind of Loneliness”

Analog, 1972

Martin describes this and “With Morning Comes Mistfall” as the stories that made his career, the ones where he really broke through and became a writer. Having read everything he’s offered in Dreamsongs, I have to agree. “Loneliness” was certainly the first story in Dreamsongs that made me sit up and take notice. He also says it was emotionally raw, written much more from the heart (“and the balls”) than the head, and that also shows. The first time I read it, it hit me right in the gut, for a lot of reasons.

“Loneliness” is about a man (again, unnamed) who’s an engineer on a wormhole out past Pluto; his job is to open the wormhole when ships come through. He’s been out here for about 4 years and is anticipating his relief and going back home, but thinking about Earth and his last relationship sends him into a spiral of anxiety, depression, and finally psychosis (though it could be argued that he’s psychotic the whole time).

While he’s waiting, the man broods about lots of things: loneliness, boredom, the reasons men might come out here and be completely alone to do something like this, his relationship. The bit that punched me right in the gut the first time I read it is kind of the thesis of the whole story. He’s talking about loneliness and says there’s two kinds: the first kind is the “solemn, brooding, tragic loneliness” of men physically isolated from others—people who man lighthouses, for example. Walt Whitman. You know. But:

And then there is the second kind of loneliness.

[. . .]

It’s the loneliness of people trapped within themselves. The loneliness of people who have said the wrong thing so often that they don’t have the courage to say anything anymore.

The loneliness, not of distance, but of fear.

I am an introvert who also suffers from anxiety (not at a clinical, disorder level, but enough to be irritating), and this resonated with me, as did his brooding examination of the relationship he had with Karen. The tendency to revisit past incidents, to remind yourself how stupid you were, to cringe at how people must know you’re a complete idiot, is not unfamiliar to me. That kind of obsessive thinking leads, as it does in “Loneliness,” to depression. The “hero” has nightmares about Karen, ones that he can only curtail by spending more and more time looking at space and even opening the wormhole when there’s no reason to. He uses space time as a drug, isolating himself even further from everything else. Then he starts drinking heavily.

In the last few diary entries, Martin reveals that the man has been insane for a while. He remembers that it’s actually months later than he thought it was, that his relief already arrived, and that he blew up the ship. He was afraid to go back and afraid not to go back and had been alone with his own disorders for so long that he freaked out and opened the wormhole, which the ship in question wasn’t designed to go through.

And then he breaks the calendar and forgets again and begins waiting for his relief to arrive.

Another interesting facet of the story is the treatment of Karen. We know very little about her except what the protagonist tells us, which is mostly that he loved her more than she loved him. This is pretty standard for lonely-guy stories, but it’s really interesting that, despite setting her up as kind of a manic pixie dream girl, the protagonist doesn’t blame her for not being what he needed.

She’d tried to help, to give him some of her self-confidence, some of the courage and bounce that she faced life with.

He’s aware that the problem is all on his side and doesn’t hate her or whine about being friendzoned or any of the other things you might expect from a situation like this. He goes back and forth on whether to try to contact her again when he gets back to Earth, but it’s missing a sense of entitlement. He doesn’t seem to think he has the right to inflict himself on her, even though he’s tried to change, partly because it would just hurt him and partly because he knows she doesn’t love him back and it would be pointless.

If “Loneliness” is a psychological, internal story, “With Morning Comes Mistfall” is a sociological one, an exploration of myth and belief and their place in society. We’ll look at that one next week.