not only is it tremendously time consuming but perhaps not all that fulfilling....
In her coming book, "Alone Together"....
wasn't merely a distraction, but it was really confusing him about who he was....

"Alone Together". Post-industrial living. Awful. But people do still desire some aspects of how they once lived. A world where there was far more face to face interaction. Where your house wasn't a fortress and you didn't even know your neighbors. Where instead there was some meaningful connection and you interacted on a daily basis with the people whom live around you. A world where you felt connected to both nature and other people. Facebook and some other things online reveal this desire in people to have such a connection with others. But trying to get it there is like already being dead.

But, it's a good way to keep in touch with all the people that don't live close?

Industrialized society again. Always moving. And walled away in your fortress. TV, internet, car, no one you work with even lives anywhere near you.

What reason is there for me to speak to anyone ever?

Go to work. Slap on a smile. Go home. I don't exist.

...Van Gogh's unoccupired chairs pay respect to a tendency to avoid represtentation of the human figure. Gauguin is there, seated in his armchair, even if we cannot see him - according to this formula.

The breat in the two artists' friendship had become inevitable. When Gauguin decided to leave, he left the ruins of van Gogh's dreams of an artists' community in the South behind. "As you know, I have always considered it idiotic that painters live alone. It is always a loss if one is left to one's own devices", van Gogh had written to his brother, describing his longing for solidarity amongst painters.

"....sooner there will be nothing left... but empty chairs."

"In the 19th century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist: the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity...

"The 19th century was the inhuman century par excellence; the triumph of technology mechanized our lives totally, rendering us stupid; the worship of Mammon has irredemably impoverished mankind, without exception; and a world without God is not only the least moral but als othe least comfortable that can be conceived. As he enters the Present, modern man reaches the inmost circle of hell along his absurd and necessary path of suffering."- Egon Friedell