The Loneliness of the Long Distance...
The loneliness of the long distance runner is a metaphor for the loneliness of life as such. Runners or not, we all travel paths that cannot be retraced or fully communicated. The image of the lonely runner speaks to us because it reflects a broader fact of life. Even among friends, spouses, parents, pets, and children, a life is always lived alone, from beginning to end. William James puts the thought like this in his Principles of Psychology : It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought , but my thought , every thought being owned . Neither contemporaneity, not proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together when are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds. The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute in nature. What James writes here is true; the breaches between my thought and your thought, those streaming and ethereal flows which we denote as mi...