Image by Dawson Toth
“Hell is other people” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1944, thereby assuring his place among the ranks of Legendary Curmudgeons. Perhaps I’ll be joining him, because I sometimes find that, paradoxically, loneliness is other people.
Like many of us, I experienced loneliness most intensely as an adolescent. I suppose this is unsurprising; adolescence is a period when we are separating ourselves from our parents, and yet also experiencing increasing discrepancies between ourselves and that arbitrary cohort of peers, selected by the blunt instrument of birth year, with whom we have been thrust together for six or even thirteen years of education. It’s also a time when popular culture is bombarding us with the suggestion that the universal and invincible solution to loneliness is romantic love. (I fell for this particular line completely, trying to patch up the loneliness and alienation I experienced from the age of 12 or 13 with a series of long-lasting, intense romantic relationships that acted as my only human anchor-point in a sea of general lostness.)
I’m grateful every day to have escaped the morass of my own rather extended adolescence, but adulthood (why do I always want to put that word in quotes?) brings its own difficulties as far as loneliness is concerned. It’s culturally expected – almost a duty, it sometimes seems – that you should be lonely if you’re not in a relationship, or have few close friends. [This is what makes a book like Solitude (yesterday's sunday best) so refreshing, defending as it does the merits of solitude and pointing out that the ability to be contentedly alone is an important component of maturity.] However, the converse expectation is also applied: if you’re in a relationship and have lots of friends, being lonely is inexplicable, possibly aberrant – almost a kind of disloyalty.
It’s not something one is supposed to admit to, but I often feel lonely in the company of groups of people. Some of this is probably a side effect of being an introvert; even enjoyable social interaction can be a bit draining, and if I’m tired, I can’t always summon the vim to participate fully. However, some of it is about not fitting in, which remains a lonely feeling even now. My problem – which is certainly not unique to me – is that it’s hard to find groups of people where all of me is both acknowledged and acceptable. My computer-geek side, with its scientific curiosity and genuine enthusiasm for programming, doesn’t really fit into either the “literary” world or my day-to-day small town life; at best, it’s a kind of zany quirk that’s occasionally useful for whimsical biographical entries and fixing broken computers. Outside of the literary world, the fact that I write poems seems to be almost an embarrassment – certainly something that most people aren’t comfortable talking about – and I generally stay off the subject. (And here was me thinking that “I’m a computer scientist” was the biggest conversation-killer at parties…)
I think the worst kind of loneliness, though, is the loneliness brought about by its supposed antidote, romantic love. The ferocious isolation of lying next to someone in a dark bedroom, in mutual frosty silence, is soul-destroying precisely because it engenders loneliness while simultaneously and starkly revealing love’s failure as a perfect antidote for it. I always think of that loneliness when I hear U2′s evocative lines There is a silence that comes to a house / where no-one can sleep. [Aside: how COULD they follow that up with the utterly unforgiveable I guess it's the price of love; / I know it's not cheap"? Argh!]. Perhaps the last word should go to Philip Larkin, who captures this most intimate loneliness beautifully in his poem “Talking In Bed” (which I copied out into my notebook when I was 15 or 16, already sensing some of its dark veracity.) You can read it here.
Bugger loneliness! All you need is someone to care for you when you’re under the weather. At other times it’s reassuring to feel loved (‘Whatever love means’: HRH The Prince of Wales). Women have a biological imperative to procreate, and men have a corresponding need. Once that’s done with (post-menopause) male and female should theoretically be able to relate on a plateau of Platonic equability. But our servitude to the myriad pulls of social forces programmes us to expect all sorts of textbook perfections without which we are, apparently, inadequate. The to-die-for figure; Chiantishire holidays; amazing children who scale heights we couldn’t; the sunlit uplands of dinner parties, rounds of golf, endless fiscal buoyancy, and no hint of existential angst. It doesn’t in the real world work like that. Imperfection and compromise are the norm. If we can live with this we can, paradoxically, feel something approaching contentment.
A monk once paid me a compliment. I forget the exact word he used, but he said that the minute he laid eyes on me I seemed to him….. solitary? alone? lonely? The exact word makes no difference. Actually it was more a kind of scientific observation than a compliment. But words like ‘lonely’ or ‘alone’ do (usually) carry a negative charge, which was certainly entirely lacking from the monk’s intended meaning. He was actually a Franciscan Friar, which is not quite the same thing as a monk.
Light and dark: loneliness and the ‘outsider’ view can be rich soil for creativity.
I think I would take “solitary” as a compliment – or at least an astute observation. So much of what matters to me (in terms of creativity etc) seems to be dependent on a capacity to be alone. For me, the people who are most tiring to be around are those who have little capacity for being alone (and therefore have to be constantly interacting, constantly requiring feedback).
I’ve always related to what Donald Winnicott had to say about these things. One of his characteristics of the “good enough mother” is that she enables the baby to learn to be “alone in the presence of another” (e.g. here) – and he saw this capacity for aloneness as essential in helping the individual to develop a True Self rather than a compliant False Self.
I can rarely relate to the uneasy silence in (un)romantic love, only after a disagreement, but rather to a companionly silence, in which I can sit in a room with my wife without feeling the need to talk, but still feeling the warmth of each others company… or am I missing the point here?
They’re very different kinds of silence, aren’t they? I enjoy the companionable kind too (being absorbedly alone together.) The post-disagreement kind is something else…
Yes, I agree…
…and there is no such word as companionly, yours is correct. Oh holy dictionary, wherefore art thou?