Wir Alle Sind Allein

If you speak German, you would know what the title means. If you don’t, please know that I'm not trying to show off. Read on, and you’ll find out what it means and why I had to use it.

I recently met a Mexican solo traveller- Javier. Most solo travellers have something in common: they are not scared of being alone; they are not necessarily introverts; in fact, they could make most people feel at ease in their company; and they know how to enjoy solitude. They also tend to think too much, mostly about questions that we'll probably never have answers to.

We got along well and decided to travel together for a bit. Javier hitchhikes. So, we picked a few points on a 250-kilometer route in central Mexico. He would get to each of those points hitchhiking and wait there for me, while I would ride Brownie to get there. We mostly wild-camped, except when a restaurant owner invited us to camp in the backyard of one of his disused properties- lush green with a fish-pond.

Besides helping me improve my Spanish, Javier introduced me to a lot of Latin American literature and explained to me the nuances of Mexican cuisine like no other. I passed on to him whatever little I know about meditating.

We had way too many interesting conversations. In one of our abstruse conversations, he recommended something by Huxley. While reading that, I came across these words:
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies–all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”

The day we parted, he brought up Sartre and existentialism. It was a conversation we could not finish. But his words and the quote above remind me of a conversation that I had in Norway with a German woman. I could not share it with Javier that day due to lack of time, but I now feel like sharing it with all of you.

I was camping in a Norwegian fjord. A fjord, loosely put, is a geographical combination of ocean and mountains mostly found near the poles, I think. In the majestic beauty of that fjord, you could undergo ego death worse than one afforded by an acid trip.



A few hours after I set up my tent, arrived an RV or a Wohnmobil (as the Germans call it). My mobile phone battery had died so I decided to knock on its door. A white man in his 60s stepped out. I asked him in English if I could charge my phone. He didn’t speak English so he immediately called his wife outside. As soon as he did, I figured they were German. Before the wife came outside, I tried to translate my request into German in my head. As soon as I said it out loud, Joachim and Katherina were pleasantly surprised and smiled. Seeing you make an effort to speak a person's language purges most suspicions that they may have about you. Katherina immediately invited me inside their Wohnmobil.

Her fine wrinkles, like runes, secretly conveyed her youthful beauty. The warmth in her eyes and her gentle smile (but childish laughter) compensated for whatever little those wrinkles managed to hide. Over the next two days, we talked a lot, sometimes over some fine wine- in Germlish with Katherina and in German with Joachim (sometimes Katherina had to act as our interpreter).

In my travels through Europe, in the initial few weeks, I asked some people what they believed was the meaning of life. I stopped posing that question after this conversation.

On our third day of being camping neighbours, it started to rain outside. So Katherina invited me over. She was reading one of those German thrillers that she had introduced me to. I, too, was reading something. Joachim was out fishing on his inflatable motorboat- his “new toy” as Katherina referred to it.

It was a little abrupt when I asked Katherina, “Can I ask you something?”

“Was möchtest du fragen?” (What do you want to ask?)

“Was ist der Sinn des Lebens?” (What is the meaning or purpose of life?)

She laid her book on the table, took off her reading glasses, and looked right into my eyes trying to gauge if I deserved an honest response.

She smiled while holding back a teardrop. And then she said, “Wir alle sind allein.” (We are all alone.)

That was her introduction to a fairly lengthy response. Now it may sound dramatic, but as soon as I heard those four words, they echoed in my head. Wir. Alle. Sind. Allein. Over and over again. I was ensconced in the second chair of the Wohnmobil, there was a maelstrom outside and another one in my mind for not knowing how to react. It became  hard for me to focus on what else she had to say, but I know she was being brutally honest.

One thing that couldn't escape my attention was: “People change. You can spend your whole life with another person. Suddenly, one day, that person will do something that will make you wonder, ‘I thought I knew this person.’”

After a long monologue, and during which she seemed to me like an old person eagerly wanting to pass on her life lessons to a (worthy?) younger stranger, she suddenly went back to being her normal self. She took out her binoculars to look out if Joachim was on his way back. He was indeed. She excitedly went about, “Oooh, my husband’s back. It’s time for lunch!”

I looked at her trying to remind her that we had just had such a deep conversation. How could she go back to being her normal self so conveniently? I had more questions: whom was she referring to when she said that people change? Did she feel hurt? If all of us are alone then why did she go through it all? Why should anyone go through life at all? But, for her, our conversation was over. Perhaps, she was feeling vulnerable having revealed too much to a stranger whom she had just gotten to know. Perhaps, not. I’ll never know.

Right then, Joachim knocked on the door.

“Give me a few minutes, honey. Lunch will be ready soon. The young man and I were having a chat.”

Joachim said he would be back and shut the door.

Katherina quickly added, “I like you because you are doing what YOU wanted to do. That’s how it should be. That’s how I was.” And, once again, went back to doing her chores.

For me, those four words were too overwhelming. I wanted to leave immediately- not just the Wohnmobil but that place. I wanted to be back on the road. Alone. I didn’t care anymore about Emma either (long story short: somebody I'd met not too far from where we were at).

I packed my stuff and said goodbye to Katherina. Joachim was not around. We hugged each other. She knew I was not mad at her or anybody. I was mad because somebody else had affirmed what I knew all along. So it must be true, but why does it have to be like that? 

I didn’t turn back till I knew I was quite some distance from her. When I did, she was still there looking at me through her binoculars, most likely making sure that I was all right, at least, till I was out of her field of view.

In hindsight, perhaps it was not an extraordinarily unique revelation of a truth. After all, back in school, I was made to dress up as Krishna and recite the summary of the Bhagwad Gita on Krishna's birth anniversary. One of the things the Bhagwad Gita says is exactly what Katherina did. That’s what Sartre said. And Huxley too.

Why not opt out of life then? Why go through it nevertheless?

I now think that when Katherina suddenly went back to being normal, what she tried to demonstrate to me was that “wir alle sind allein” is a realisation that one must constantly bear in mind as a defence mechanism, while we perform our many parts merely as players and go through our relationships, so we won’t feel hurt because of another person.

But that still does not answer the question- why go through life in the way we have organised ourselves (to avoid the Hobbesian state of nature) if wir alle sind allein? And how do we reconcile this with Christopher McCandless’s realisation that “happiness [is] only real when shared”?

PS: Don't worry, Mom, I'll be fine as a fiddle.