Feeling alienated from the world is not a new phenomenon.

We believe we don’t belong, and our lack of confidence underscores our strangeness. Authenticity becomes dangerous for fear of exposing our dislocation, as if there were a flaw in our manufacture, putting us in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two examples, many years apart.

The first is 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, portrayed in the 1999 movie Girl, Interrupted. The story begins with an overdose, leading to psychiatric hospitalization.

A friend of hers on the same ward, Daisy, kills herself late in the film.

A nurse, Valerie, attempts to console Susanna:

• Valerie: “What would you have said to her?”
• Susanna: “I don’t know. That I was sorry. That I will never know what it was like to be her. But I know what it’s like to want to die. How it hurts to smile. How you try to fit in, but you can’t. You hurt yourself on the outside to try to kill the thing on the inside.”

In the course of her treatment, her psychiatrist Dr. Wick captures Susanna’s estrangement with a quotation in Latin from Seneca’s Hercules Furens:

“What place is this, what region, what shores of the world? “

Seneca (4 BC — 65 AD) understood Susanna’s sense of not belonging 2,000 years ahead of her birth.

Something of a different vintage touches us. It is the 1902 song by Gustav Mahler – “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen“ (Rückert): “I have become lost to the world.”

Once again, we sense ostracism and exclusion from the smiling faces around us. There is an ache in the singer’s voice — a quiet resignation, revealing his self-exile from the possibility of a shared life.

Mahler identifies with the poetry he set to music. As the composer wrote, “It is my very self” expressed in this work.

Modernity has been blamed for such feelings since the Industrial Revolution. Yet, if we listen to songs that move us to tears, we are not so alone as we think.

Mahler is someone else who shares a recognition of our emotional life without knowing us.

A connection to others often comes in the music matched to words, reminding us that some strangers feel as we do, and we are not so odd and dislocated after all.

Defying the singer’s message, we realize we must search for individuals who identify with the music, and thereby with us.

Not only the vocal art of Mahler, but any composition — any song or symphony in which we find the recognition of our vulnerability — enlarges our awareness and demonstrates the possibility of human connectedness.

Soul mates are out there.

No wonder that one of the first questions we ask of a new acquaintance is, “What music do you like?”

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The top image is Lotus and Herons by Huang Yongyu, 1984. It is followed by Vasile Kazar’s untitled painting. Both are sourced from Wikart.org/