David McElroy

I miss having someone to miss.

Loving someone can be a paradox. It can be the most rewarding experience of your life, and it can also be the most miserable experience of your life. But there’s something powerful and life-giving about being in love, even in those times which bring deep hurt.

Nearly five years ago, I wrote something one night when I was in the depths of a painful experience of longing for a woman who I missed. It’s not especially well-written, but it’s raw and honest, which has made it my most-read article for the last few years. A lot of people seem to read it late at night, and I get a lot of email from people either thanking me for reassuring them they weren’t alone or else begging for my advice.

At the time, I was deeply in love with a woman who I desperately wanted back in my life. My need for her was painful. It hurt to want someone back so badly, but I still had hope — so there was constant tension in my life. I was in terrible pain from missing her, but I believed the pain would be worthwhile in the end — because I believed in her and I believed she would return.

Tonight, I feel something different. I don’t feel longing or even the pain of loving someone I can’t have. I feel the emptiness of being alone — but it’s different now, because I don’t have love or hope for a particular woman to focus on.

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I wasn’t even supposed to be in the class. I was a sophomore at the University of Alabama and I was taking a creative writing class that was supposed to be reserved for seniors and grad students.

The instructor was a stern older man with a long history as a published literary author. I had been required to get his permission to sign up for the class — and he was dubious about whether I was ready for the work. It turned out he was right and I was wrong.

There are basically two kinds of writers, to oversimplify quite a bit. There’s the literary kind, the type who write fiction and creative writing that leaves you feeling as though you’ve had an experience with art. And there’s the kind who are really good at communicating information in a straightforward way. That includes journalists and most essayists and even technical writers.

The instructor was the literary type. I was the informational type.

My newspaper training had made me really good at writing clear and concise accounts of events. I could even write opinions well. But I was terrified when given the chance to take a chance on literary writing. After a few sessions of the class, I got scared and dropped the course.

I’ve realized recently that I am at the point in life at which I have to make the transition — from glorified copy boy to making actual art — that I was afraid to make back then. It still scares me.

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Most people sense that something is wrong with modern culture. Even if they can’t put it into words, most have at least a vague feeling of discomfort. It’s a feeling of dread about the future.

What we’ve known as Western Civilization is slowly breaking down. It’s happening because of changes rooted in bad philosophical ideas and misunderstandings about how technology affects us. Rational people lost the culture when they allowed irrational people to take over academia and substitute the fuzzy ideas of postmodernism for the ideas of the Enlightenment. And now we are heading for a new Dark Ages again.

But even if you start seeing outlines of the core issues, it’s hard to create a coherent narrative to explain to others what’s going wrong. Without that, you’re powerless to change anything, because it’s almost impossible for most people to see the precise nature of the intellectual, moral and cultural rot around them — even if they’re vaguely aware that something’s wrong.

Without such a simple narrative, nobody will listen. They’ve been taught they already know everything worth knowing. Technology has destroyed their attention spans. They want everything presented as a funny “meme” — with maybe 10 words to attack whoever they hate — and they’re not interested in looking beyond whatever shiny thing has caught their attention right now.

This is one of the most important things I’ve ever said — to anybody, anywhere — but almost nobody will hear it. Even fewer will understand. Their eyes will glaze over instead. And that breaks my heart.

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