Sudden realization of hunger for taste of kindred soul is killing me

By David McElroy · November 14, 2018

I’ve been starving for a long time — and I fear this hunger might destroy me — but I have no idea where to find this peculiar thing which I crave tonight.

When you’ve been hungry for long enough, you eventually quit feeling hunger. If you don’t believe me, go on a fast or at least stop eating sugar. At first, you’re desperately hungry and you crave what you’re not getting. But after awhile, your body chemistry stabilizes and changes in some ways that aren’t worth getting into here. Then you quit feeling hunger. Even if you’re starving to death, your body might not feel hunger.

My hunger isn’t for food. This hunger won’t kill me physically. But I haven’t had this need met for so long that I had quit noticing the hunger. I’ve been operating as I am for so long that I’m numb — in ways that are intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

But something happened tonight that triggered the hunger. I was reminded of what it feels like to have this need filled — and the realization of the painful need was back like a forgotten forest fire raging out of control. And now it threatens to consume me.

I was listening to a CBC radio documentary about Ayn Rand on the way home from work. I’m not an objectivist and I have very mixed feelings about some of Rand’s ideas, but her work was very influential for me early in my life. Whatever else you could say about her — and I could write quite a bit about her, both positive and negative — she was someone who took ideas very seriously.

When I was a teen-ager, some of her ideas enchanted me. Her ideas about the relationship between economics and moral philosophy resonated with my intuitive beliefs. Although I rejected much of what she taught in the philosophy she called objectivism, she was the only writer I knew at the time who was standing up for the rights of the individual as a matter of simple morality.

As I listened to this documentary — especially the parts that dealt with Rand growing close to (and then falling in love with) a man who shared her ideas — I felt a hunger for that kind of intellectual and spiritual communion.

I felt as though a violent wildfire had suddenly slammed into me with massive force — and I was left gasping for breath as I suddenly recalled what it has felt like in the past to experience that with women in my life. It was such an emotional realization that I felt like crying — and my soul can’t quit craving this like a junkie who desperately needs a fix.

I introduced Rand’s novels to one former girlfriend. We talked about the books for hours and debated Rand’s ideas. She wasn’t just a passive student soaking in what I could teach her. She was brilliant and incisive, developing her own love and understanding for certain characters and themes.

The same girlfriend and I used to read books to each other and talk about them. Early in our relationship, I recorded an entire book and emailed sections to her because she was having trouble with her eyes at the time and couldn’t read easily. (She later told me that a friend who found out I did that told her, “This guy is worth keeping.”) In the later stages of our relationship, she recorded sections of Rand’s “The Fountainhead” for me. We had both read it multiple times and knew the material well, but her reading to me like this was her way of feeling close to me.

My point here isn’t about that particular woman, though. I’ve experienced this meeting of minds and souls with other women through books and ideas. There was another woman with whom I used to read books. We would alternate who read aloud and we would stop and discuss passages, either for understanding or for quibbling with the author. We read things ranging from Machiavelli’s “The Prince” to Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich.”

I’m not saying I’m hungry to join a book club. That’s not the point.

I’m hungry for the intellectual and emotional intimacy that comes from encountering the soul of a brilliant and curious woman. I’m hungry for the communion and intellectual intercourse that come from sharing ideas and becoming excited about shared growth.

I haven’t had this sort of mind and soul communion for a long time. I realized tonight just how desperate I am to have it again. I don’t mean I have a particular script it has to follow. I just mean with the right woman — a woman with a mind that’s curious and compatible with mine — this meeting of minds is just as exciting as sex.

This sort of need is difficult to describe. I don’t know how many people understand it in exactly the way it works for me. For me, it’s something powerful which exists at the intersection of intelligence, curiosity, ambition, attraction and sex. It’s a high which not everyone has experienced.

Since I know what it feels like — and since that hunger was reawakened tonight by being reminded of what it feels like — my mind and heart are desperate for it right now. I need to taste the soul of the right woman who can experience the same thing.

I’m desperately hungry for something I had forgotten I need. And the pain of not having it is too intense to bear. That pain is the reason I eventually get numb just to survive. I understand that.

But my heart and mind long for a kindred soul to touch deeply again before I lose the intensity of this pain. I’m desperately hungry, but all the food in the world can’t fill this hole. Only a kindred soul will do.

Share on Social Networks

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

Related Posts