My editor twirled her wine glass across the table from me, looking thoughtful. “I want you to write about when it is good,” she said finally. “When you actually enjoy being alone.” No doubt she guessed this might pose a real stretch.
The truth is, there is plenty that is good about it. More than what is bad-though that belief shifts and ripples daily, along with the private states of things. Still, in my mind’s gallery, the glad-I-lived-this-long hall of fame, some of the loveliest memories have had everything to do with being alone. In each, the humblest particulars stand out like tiny jewels.
There was an evening: sitting at the word processor, cup of tea in hand, Catalan guitar on the FM, wearing my favorite old flannel shirt, a beat-to-hell pink-and-gray-checked affair that feels buttery as a baby blanket. A settled stillness from the dark streets enfolded my little apartment. I looked around, blinked and suddenly felt a dawning.
I was happy.
It lasted long enough for me to breathe it, to silently name its elements like beads on a rosary: The people I loved were safe and well. I was safe and well. I had work before me I loved, and no one would forbid me to pursue it. I was not in unmanageable debt. I had peace, autonomy, creative freedom. I may not have had a mate or children there with me. But I had beloved friends and family, including children, who cared very much about me, counted on seeing me, and wouldn’t hesitate to help if I needed it.
Isn’t this something like what people have founded nations and died in wars for?
Other scenes filter in, so common that citing them makes me sound like the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning: streets of my city, brilliant with moving life. The Sierra Nevada looming like great gentle snow-covered dinosaurs alongside my car. Music, art, sunlight, air. All of it goes in. All of it counts.
For a writer, to be able to kick around alone for long periods is as vital as breathing. In my case, much of that time is spent very simply: running in the park, swimming, reading, walking, driving, catching a movie. I admit a certain sadness about the enforced isolation, but there is also serenity. At these intervals, thinking wanders free, idiosyncratic and random as it likes. Only then can a certain interiority be accessed, a chance to shuffle the complex data with the mundane, to register gathered notions and impressions, to view my own incongruous presence in the grid of lives around me: to muse on the miracle of musing.
One can’t easily think like this in any kind of company, whether it’s the water-heater repairman, the 9-year-old nephew or the friend you meet for tea. For it works a separate musculature to address others, to anticipate needs and frame responses, to stay in the volleying. A soft internal monologue hums during daily interchange, giving cues and tips and cutoff signals like the earplug murmuring in a news anchor’s ear. Taken away from that, a deeper monologue drifts up. Some of it is gibberish, but some of it has weight, like glints of gold in a sifting pan. In solitude I slowly come to know one from the other.
There is a Mobius-strip quality to the riddle of aloneness: I both crave it and dread it. To lose it is to remember why I chose it. Travel, house guests, even a lover come to roost a while-all reacquaint me in a hurry with the reasons I keep a solitary style. So seldom in the business or homemaking day does anyone get time alone to breathe, to rest, to organize thought, to take a longer view. As soon as regular blocs of it are even temporarily postponed, my instinct, strong as a swimmer’s groping to the surface for air, is to strive madly to get it back. Otherwise, some basic equilibrium is lost, a well-being, an awareness that focuses the rest of existence. I can’t easily know you, unless I can frequently be allowed to remember, alone, who I am.
And yet too much can be frightening. The haunting danger, for a woman living alone, is of growing brittle with habit-closing off to spontaneity, sliding into an almost feral wariness. Self-pity’s the worst enemy of all, and I now see, an unaffordable luxury. When I was younger-read, immortal-it had a certain romantic cachet. As kids we thought it pretty to sulk and languish, leering smokily at the world from behind our own potential. Later we find nobody’s looking, and anyway there’s no time for it. For years I kept a cartoon sent by a friend, showing a small sign posted at the edge of a large body of water: Sea of Self-Pity: No Wallowing.
Like an astronaut’s disorientation after a long time in orbit, perspective can warp in unrelieved solitude. You need some form of cold water to smack you awake-to keep paranoia at bay, to avoid lapsing into viewing your own aloneness as a kind of tragic freefall. Conversation, fresh air, a change of scene-whatever it takes, you must build in antidotes-must regenerate daily your own grid of meaning: your own reasons to live. It is not that this existential bottom-line is not ultimately true for everyone else. It is that the loner has less to distract her from it.
I notice that people who do not spend much time alone have trouble understanding the struggle against the specter of loneliness. It’s tough to convey, because the words have become transparent from overuse. Far as we imagine we’ve come as a society, the woman alone is still viewed with a certain unease: Why isn’t she with someone? If that woman stays observant, and compassionate, she feels less and less that prickle of indictment and more and more the larger, kinder understanding that all arrangements are finally provisional. Lovers, marriages, families, careers-all turn out to have limited shelf lives: at very least, never what they seem. It’s a revelation, and a comfort. We begin to let go of a frenzy for permanence, a belief that grace is final, granted by some ineffable Other. It’s no longer a binary world. Things come and go.
But we are never so detached as to be immune to longing. Composer Marvin Hamlisch once described returning to his apartment after a glittery evening of winning several Oscars for his music. Puffed with glory as he walked to his door, he suddenly wilted upon opening it. He’d just won three Oscars, been hailed and adored-and then he was gazing at his unchanged apartment, empty and dark and silent, realizing that the cat litter needed changing. What did the fame and fortune matter, if there were not something deeper, warmer, more abiding and palpable than a roomful of trophies, awaiting him where it counted?
A shrewd friend of mine, who is not American, snorts with impatience at this plaintive little parable. “Why do Americans always imagine it should ever be any other way?” he demands. “We all have to face the same mundanenesses, the same terrors. We’re all born alone; we’re all going to die alone some day. It is the cat litter which is transcendent, not the Oscars!”
I have to laugh. My friend’s point echoes the familiar Zen adage, “Before satori, chop wood and carry water; after satori, chop wood and carry water.” And this vision-of being both humbled and exalted in simple acts of daily attention; of being profoundly moved by the passionate persistence of the life in and around us-brings me squarely back to the mysterious joy of living quietly alone. The late Raymond Carver wrote:
And did you get what
you wanted, from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. END ITALIC
The music of streets and seasons, an old flannel shirt: the woman alone finds her belovedness in unexpected ways.
