Solitude And The Farmed

Two terrifying stories that will worm their way into your consciousness and make you wish you had a safer place to hide.... From "Solitude" - "Since leaving the navy, Archie Gibson had found himself in a different world, with no rules and no limit to hinder his twisted soul from the path it now took." Archie Gibson is a sociopath who was hung for murder over one hundred years ago. Now he's back-to possess the body of his great-great-nephew Calum Gibson. Archie Gibson wants to be your friend, and if you are lonely he will find you ... and you will never be lonely again. From "The Farmed" - "When I cry, I cry because I know the truth." Michael, a retired postal worker, has lost his beloved wife. Each day, however, he has been seeing her and conversing with her. When she tells him that he has been chosen for a great purpose, which will renew the world, he agrees to journey into space. Soon he realizes that what his wife has proposed and the alien "farmers" wish to give is nothing less than a horrifying future.

This book presents a thematic analysis of various aspects of solitude, silence and loneliness, from the ancient world to the present day, explored thematically with consideration to the links between aloneness to other social and political issues. The themes include exile (expulsion from a community), ecstasy (getting 'out of oneself') and enstasy (being comfortable within oneself), to the Romantic idea of the artist as solitary. There is work on aloneness in and through nature, especially the importance of natural settings for positive experiences of solitude. A central theme is alienation and its emotions, with the idea of loneliness and the rejected self being a more modern experience. The book explores modernism and postmodernism as presenting new forms of solitude in the twentieth century, and how, more recently, there have been attempts to 'recover' the self, through therapeutic uses of the arts. All of these types and experiences of aloneness are described through the lenses of artistic, literary and musical forms of expression, as aloneness is not only explored and articulated through these art forms, but is in many ways created through these art forms.

The papers assembled in this book originated from, and span, the recent decades of intensive economic globalization and international interaction—up to the present period of the commercialized, digital world—accompanied by American and international crisis. High hopes of the benefits of trade expansion, international cooperation, growing prosperity and a “rules-based” international order have given way to the unpredictable contingencies of human action and history, pandemics, severe economic and social dislocations, domestic division, frequent political dysfunction and growing threats of intensified international conflict. This book places contemporary problems of American democracy and the threat of authoritarian systems within the context of the success and failures of American history, problems of moral authority in American society and the need for political and moral balance in the US constitutional system.