An American can reach in the depths of the soul a peculiar solitude that comes from feeling deeply alone without having the trappings around him of a nation. Europeans in the romantic period of the 19th century pushed their lonely imaginings back in time to other less mechanized and less rationalized periods but they always kept the borders of some nation fixed securely about them. Henry Thoreau during the romantic period discovered transcendence and inspiration wandering alone in the woods around Concord. His great book Walden extols the virtues of solitude. As for a nation, he wrote that he had for the first time in his life the experience of living in a nation listening just before the Civil War to a lecture in Concord by the anti-slavery, anti-government radical John Brown.
Brexit proved many Europeans prefer to be alone in a nation and that being alone without one is perhaps too painful. The young in the UK were all for denationalization. They were willing to face the perils of solitude wandering freely about the 28 nations of the European Union with the political right to live and work in any state of the union simply by taking up residency in one as in America. Their elders decided they needed borders, limits to their freedom, one mighty all-powerful sovereign government, one state, one nation, one monster with a hundred eyes focused on them forever and present even in their solitude which will never be as deep and unbridled as Henry Thoreau’s American solitude.
Oh, it’s not so bad solitude in America. Brexit is showing signs of ruling here too. We never found a name for our nation because our legal name, The United States of America, simply doesn’t ring true for a nation. But some delegates to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that nominated Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to run for President in November were heard shouting, USA! USA! USA!. It does little to soothe your solitude on a lonely night to tell yourself you live in a place named USA but it will have to do. Brexit is a red flag yelling that many Americans and Europeans don’t like living alone or otherwise with the extensive freedoms and the national emptiness of a union of states.
Daniel McNeill
Daniel McNeill’s novella The End of All Beginnings is available at
Read it free on Kindle with a free app or buy it on Kindle for $1.99.
Also available as a book for $5.99.
A powerful and very dramatic exploration of love and relations between
a 70-year-old man and four women, two sisters 18 and 19, their mother
46, and a lesbian friend 22. It is full of well-written dialogues between the five
In various situations including sexual relations. The drama moves fast right
from the start and it is impossible not to read it as quickly as possible (it
can be read in less than three hours} to an ending that is totally unexpected
and explosive. A complex drama that moves with its own momentum towards
one liberating ending to all its beginnings.
Daniel McNeill
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