Whenever someone asks me if I’m lonely, I never know what they expect me to say. The question embarrasses me, because I can’t give a vivid, easily digestible answer that I myself, let alone anyone else, would find satisfying. From one angle, life is a solitary, bitter journey — lonely through and through. But shift the angle slightly, and you might catch sight of all the color along that solitary road, and find yourself marveling at how beautiful life can be. Solitude is a state; loneliness is a state of mind. In theory, a person should be able to adjust their mindset, turn it positive and hopeful. And yet the aloneness we’re born into guarantees a loneliness that never quite washes off. This, I think, is where my deep sympathy with Air Doll comes from — it’s also what we, flesh and blood, share with the plastic body of an air doll: an emptiness at the core.

Let’s suppose, for argument’s sake, that life is meant to be lived joyfully, that every day should be bright and brilliant. This optimism sounds like something off a cheap advertisement, and it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Forget every day — we can’t even guarantee that every minute within a single hour is bright and brilliant. Maybe some people really can think this way, like islanders on some remote isle who feel content as long as they’re fed and warm. But does that mean they’re free of loneliness? Quite the opposite, in my view. The islanders’ devotion to carrying on the family line, to keeping the ancestral fire burning, is itself a strenuous effort to fend off loneliness — whether in the process or in the result. Zoom out further, and the entire history of humankind looks like a history of killing time. We raise sheep in order to slaughter them; we slaughter them in order to eat them; eating mutton speeds up the body’s decay; decay leads, eventually, to death — and only then does an individual’s loneliness finally come to rest.

In the banned film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, there’s a scene where the rulers force the boys and girls to eat their own excrement. I believe that in a sufficiently primitive society, such a thing could really happen. But once taboos around waste emerged, things grew complicated. As I see it, the means by which humans fend off loneliness run counter to simplicity and directness. Looked at this way, feces might actually be the most efficient source of nutrition — but to keep loneliness at bay, humanity still had to build an entire elaborate edifice of nutritional science, and from there, animal husbandry and everything that followed.

Loneliness may be humanity’s last taboo — something none of us are allowed to dwell on. Most people’s strategy is to avoid it, resist it, despise it; some, on the other hand, treasure it, even love it. The former strive desperately to find meaning; the latter strive just as desperately to pursue meaninglessness. But the starting point, either way, is loneliness — because it’s only once we’re lonely that we start to wonder whether anything means anything at all.