“O Paris, I am so lonely in you!” wrote my friend Megan when we were both in college. I love her poetry, getting to the heart of the matter all at once, as once when she wrote, “I’m poeted out.” I have been blogged out but Megan urges me to write.

I read recently that to indulge in daydreams is to emerge sadder into reality. Dreaming it will snow might make you disappointed when you discover the overcast , dry reality. And Walter Mitty must have been unhappy, can anyone remember? The Buddhists would say that living in the present is the key to happiness, but the writer in us might differ. Writers always look back, look ahead, and dream. It is almost like a drug-induced state, nostalgia, or strong imagination. We can remember sensations, colors, conversations. Lovers do this; it is how they maintain their nuclear world.

Elegy–what a beautiful word–in a country churchyard , when Thomas Gray speaks of who have passed, when remembrance is found in a tea-soaked biscuit, when even summer past is praised. Memoir, when I look back so you can see.

What do I remember in my loneliness, when I strip from it romanticism? The wants, I suppose, the I-do-not-haves. That is when I forget to take down a book, wrap myself in an afghan, and read with a cup of tea nearby. If it is winter, and the afternoon sun streams in, I fall asleep. But if it is summer, loneliness is warded off outside with a magazine, or in the labor of gardening.

Is it loneliness that makes us rely so much on email and Facebook instead of conversations? No news there, but still there we are, logging on. Where did I read about a computer program called Freedom that will not let you go on the net for a predetermined set of time? An article on Nora Ephron in The Times.

photo by roman from dreamtime.com