_solipsist_

The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a solipsist.
-Kedar Joshi


[While] solipsism may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, monism in the sense of materialism is not.
-Eugene Wigner

The most fundamental tragedy of my life is that the ones who I see do not exist and the one who exists I do not see.
-Kedar Joshi

Was everyone else really as alive as she was?...If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone's thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone's claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no one was.
-Ian McEwan

The Solipsist

BY TROY JOLLIMORE

Don't be misled:
that sea-song you hear
when the shell's at your ear?
It's all in your head.

That primordial tide
the slurp and salt-slosh
of the brain's briny wash
is on the inside.

Truth be told, the whole place,
everything that the eye
can take in, to the sky
and beyond into space,

lives inside of your skull.
When you set your sad head
down on Procrustes' bed,
you lay down the whole

universe. You recline
on the pillow: the cosmos
grows dim. The soft ghost
in the squishy machine,

which the world is, retires.
Someday it will expire.
Then all will go silent
and dark. For the moment,

however, the black-
ness is just temporary.
The planet you carry
will shortly swing back

from the far nether regions.
And life will continue
but only within you.
Which raises a question

that comes up again and again,
as to why
God would make ear and eye
to face outward, not in?