It's difficult to see the world as a net, a web of many spiders— easier, sometimes, to perceive the surroundings as a hive of bees or a colony of ants. Although, far too often, it rather seems as if we’re all sand beetles: eternally cursed to endure our own weight, loneliness as we drag our body through the sand.

In the Maeterlinck experiment involving isolating bees, he reports the insect at first endeavoring in plans of escape, eating from the honey provided by her captor. Slowly, he said, the bee turns silent, still, suicidal— rejecting any source of life— thus dying not of starvation or fatigue, but loneliness.

Deleuze crudely points out: “it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as a substantive, multiplicity, that it ceases to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual reality, image and world.” Still, are we supposed to hold firm to the hope that our struggle is not meaningless because we are a cogwheel that somehow makes the wheel spin?

Doubtless, we all part of the mess; and in the most lucid of states of mind (the most mesmerizing of moments), one cannot help but contemplate the grandness and importance of that salient bee, alone in her quest to pollinate and bring nectar back to the nest. And yet and yet, it isn't hard to understand the will of the infamous black widow that gobbles up the head of her mate after they procreate.

Two exercises for the lonely:

1. Take off your socks, sit in half-lotus on the grass, close your eyes, sit erect, and think of the wonderful mundanity of the neighborhood, the peace of Sunday night in the hive.

2. The next time you are bugged by a fly, imagine the mosquito as a blotch of paint in the collective portrait drawn by flies bugging people everywhere… imagine you too as merely one among many.

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