Come now and witness the end of all things
For in the final burning of our cities of glass
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself—
Finite infinity.
But fie admittance, that elegant word
Which hides the loathsome truth so cold
That infinities come from walls of faces
Faces ignorant, both frowning and not!
A Lonely Crystal-Poem, by Talal Caller
There are many ways to divide people: White and Coloured, Male and Female, Old and Young, North and South. Most of these divisions are artificial and devised by a society which does not know how to face up to the multitude of voices within its ranks. Some are devised for the purpose of oppression by those who recognise the ease by which a nebulous Other might be deployed for political purposes. But the one I am about to propose I have seen myself, in the eyes of people from all walks of life, concentrated at first in the deprived regions of the globe but increasingly coming home to the heart of the empires that run it. There are two types of people in this world: those who live in the wasteland and those who don’t.
Where is this wasteland, then? It’s everywhere and nowhere, in the streets and in the parks and in the blasted regions of nations whose names our newscasters struggle to announce. Except it’s in the news studios as well, and in the presidential palaces and the mansions of the lonely rich. Some of us can see it, and therefore live in it—Some of us cannot, and therefore do not. Admission to the wasteland has become increasingly easy: it is offered for free to those whose lives have been destroyed and their confidence in a peaceful future shattered. The wasteland’s true domain is in the heart. Thus, yes, those who eke out a living in Syria and Yemen belong in the wasteland, but so too do those who live in crumbling American townships and pound on Chinese barricades. And, as the century progresses, it seems inevitable that the population of this wasteland will continue to expand.
How soon, I wonder, will the population reach 8 billion screaming souls, all yearning for release?