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Quote by Joey Comeau

“I know I want love, but I have no idea who will make me happy. Emptiness doesn't know its own shape.”

Quote by Joey Comeau

Author

Joey Comeau
Joey Comeau

Joey Comeau is a Canadian writer born on September 26, 1980. Known for his humorous and self-deprecating style, he has written in various forms including novels, essays, and blogs. more

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“The dispersion of the daimonic by means of impersonality has serious and destructive effects. In New York City, it is not regarded as strange that the anonymous human beings secluded in single-room occupancies are so often connected with violent crime and drug addiction. Not that the anonymous individual in New York is alone: he sees thousands of other people every day, and he knows all the famous personalities as they come, via TV, into his single room. He knows their names, their smiles, their idiosyncrasies; they bandy about in a “we're-all-friends-together” mood on the screen which invites him to join them and subtly assumes that he does join them. He knows them all. But he himself is never known. His smile is unseen; his idiosyncrasies are important to no-body; his name is unknown. He remains a foreigner pushed on and off the subway by tens of thousands of other anonymous foreigners. There is a deeply depersonalizing tragedy involved in this. The most severe punishment Yahweh could inflict on his people was to blot out their name. “Their names,” Yahweh proclaims, “shall be wiped out of the book of the living.” This anonymous man's never being known, this aloneness, is transformed into loneliness, which may then become daimonic possession. For his self-doubts—“I don't really exist since I can't affect anyone” —eat away at his innards; he lives and breathes and walks in a loneliness which is subtle and insidious. It is not surprising that he gets a gun and trains it on some passer-by—also anonymous to him. And it is not surprising that the young men in the streets, who are only anonymous digits in their society, should gang together in violent attacks to make sure their assertion is felt. Loneliness and its stepchild, alienation, can become forms of demon possession. Surrendering ourselves to the impersonal daimonic pushes us into an anonymity which is also impersonal; we serve nature’s gross purposes on the lowest common denominator, which often means with violence.”

“There is that incessantly gnawing loneliness that leaves us ever-restless, eventually driving us to embark upon some endless journey supposing that whatever would fill us is held in some hidden treasure that lays silently buried in a yet undiscovered place. Yet, it would do us well to understand that this loneliness is no more and no less than the image of the infinite God ever-stirring within us and all the while begging to be unleashed.”

“It was almost empty save a few undergrads who had made their way over to this graduate student part of campus, probably for the quiet, the decreased chance of recognition. I'd once been like that, so lonely that I craved further loneliness. Even after I'd made a few friends in college, I would still go out of my way to create whatever conditions I needed that might allow me to be alone.”