The loneliest moment in someone's life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.
Fitzgerald captures something psychologists now recognize as dissociation—that peculiar paralysis where the mind simply *refuses* to process what the eyes are witnessing, not from weakness but as a mercy. Most people imagine catastrophe as dramatic and urgent, all flailing and crying out, but he understood that genuine devastation often arrives as a kind of numbness, a blank stare that feels almost like cowardice until you realize it's your nervous system's circuit breaker flipping. A parent losing custody, a professional discovering their company is collapsing, a person reading a diagnosis—they often report this exact sensation afterward: standing in the wreckage, unable to *feel* it yet, conscious only of their own strange stillness. That gap between disaster and comprehension, between what's happening and what you can bear to know, is where Fitzgerald locates the real loneliness.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca