On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place. It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of

Curiositas generates its own frenetic anxiety, because now I have to “keep up” and stay in the know, striving to be the person who knows before everybody else (Google “Portlandia OVER”). It’s the exhaustion of being perpetually “in the know.” Which explains why this sort of pursuit of “truth” doesn’t ever feel like the beata vita, the happy life.

We’re all a bit like Mississippi Gene, whom Sal meets in On the Road: “He had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere.”

What Camus is honest about is what Heidegger calls Angst, the anxiety that emerges in such moments, calling into question everything that we consider to be the homey faux-comfort of our absorption in the world.

As he points out in one of his early dialogues, “Just as the soul is the whole life of the body, God is the happy life of the soul. While we are doing this, until we have done it completely, we are on the road.”

As a clinician later described it to her, addiction always ends up as a “narrowing of repertoire”: life contracts to a fixation on what you can’t live without, and the rhythms of a day, a life, are engineered to secure this thing that never satisfies, is never enough.

“His trip reports betray a theme, in photo after photo entirely devoid of human companionship: empty lounges, first-class menus, embroidered satin pillows—inanimate totems of a five-star existence.” But he’s winning.

17 per cent of older people interact with family, friends or neighbours less than once a week, while 11 per cent do so less than once a month.

You don’t go to the meeting to get information, to figure something out. The point of the meeting is meeting, the solidarity forged in shared struggles.