reading the lonely Swedish poet Tranströmer I realize loneliness is
still growing all the time in this country — an enormous loneliness
still all over America — and perhaps soon that will be all that’s left in
the world — which was always there perhaps — an existential loneliness
that’s at the root of everything, and it keeps growing, and I will
have to grow too, to keep up with the growing loneliness and not
shrink away into nothingness myself, or else loneliness will fill up
my whole room, and nothing be left outside of me except the demon of
loneliness who grows all the time because he doesn’t want to be alone
in an empty furnished room, with pee-stains on his underwear, like
Gregory Corso said in his poem about getting married. It occurs to
me that I am that loneliness itself and that I have a terror of myself
always growing larger and larger and more lonely, so that eventually
I will be the last person I know on earth and everyone else strangers,
and maybe that is the fate of all the very very old, and maybe this
final loneliness doesn’t actually happen until the day of death and
then the corpse fills the whole room?
— Love — Me
(carta incluída no livro Time of Useful Consciousness, novo volume de poesia de Lawrence Ferlinghetti)