Some of the time, lately most of the time, I feel like I might be the only person in the world. It’s an illusion I suppose. Especially, as with now, when it’s the middle of the week and the middle of the year and the middle of the night and I’ve just been walking Murphy.

Yes, I am in the middle of the city. But it’s a dark quiet street in the middle of a weekday night. And it often happens that I can sneak out down the stairs, out into the dark street, and walk my dog, and return home and swagger down the dizzying hallway and back inside my cave and not see a soul. Indeed, not a soul. It could still be the middle of the city, but like a set. Only the play is done, the theater-goers have gone, everyone has left, save for one desperate actor. And all of this is one long soliloquy. Would the last man on earth have any use for art? Beauty is one thing. We need beauty. But one of art’s aims must be communication. What use for communication, what use for art, if you are the last man on earth? Also knock-knock jokes. No commerce for knock-knock jokes if you are the last man on the world.

The people on TV could just be a trick. Pre-recorded. Rerun lives. And news. Electronic fabrication. Or a game to amuse me. It’s like human contact but it isn’t. No. No soul.

And even, as far as it goes, in the daytime, with my dog. People like phantoms. As significant as set-dressing. As significant as a cut-out tree or a chandelier rigged to fall. They are transparent. They are not solid. I want to touch one, lay my hand on one, run up and grab one, a person; but only so that I can be assured that they are not there.

It’s a notion only. Like the world shuts down when I’m not looking. Like it dissolves behind me when I turn my back. Like people disappear when they walk into their apartments. Like people are machines only for my distraction and entertainment. Who is to say that they have any free will? Who is to say that they have a consciousness, that they have a soul? Solipsism is a flawless philosophy. There is no way to prove that anybody but I thinks and feels and imagines he has a free will. Solipsism is impenetrable. It is the most reasonable of the persistent and chronic bedbugs.

No. It’s a lot more likely that everyone else has a soul. That everyone else is solid and divine. And that I am the phantom. Yes. That makes a lot more sense.

SS