Note II — The Unbearable Luxury of Being Alone

Notes from a Life I Was Not Promised — Note II

On solitude, independence, and the poverty of having everything.

There is a peculiar kind of misery reserved for those who have acquired precisely the freedom they once desired.

I speak, of course, of myself.

I have an entire house at my disposal. I may sleep when I please, eat when I please, work until the early hours of the morning, or spend an evening doing absolutely nothing, those who know me, knows I can never spend an evening doing nothing. No one questions my decisions. No one demands an explanation for my movements. I need not negotiate my habits, justify my silences, or accommodate the peculiarities of another human being.

I am, by every conventional measure, an independent man.

And what an absurd achievement it is!

For I have discovered that the most terrible thing about being answerable to no one is that no one is necessarily waiting for an answer.

I return home, and the house receives me with perfect indifference.

The rooms do not inquire about my day.

The furniture does not notice my exhaustion.

The kitchen contains everything necessary for a meal, except the possibility of sharing it.

At first, this silence was agreeable.

Indeed, I welcomed it. After years of obligations, interruptions, and the constant negotiations required by human companionship, solitude appeared to me as a kind of intellectual paradise.

I could think!

I could read!

I could pursue my ambitions without the irritating demands of other people!

But I had made a most elementary mistake.

I had confused the freedom to be alone with the desire to remain alone.

These are entirely different things.

Solitude, when chosen, can be a luxury. It permits reflection, restores the exhausted mind, and protects the fragile independence of thought.

But solitude ceases to be freedom when it becomes the only arrangement available.

Then it acquires another character.

It becomes a condition.

And eventually, a burden.

There are evenings when I have something to say and no one to whom it particularly belongs.

Perhaps I have encountered an interesting idea. Perhaps something amusing happened during the day. Perhaps I am troubled by a thought that seems unbearable until it is spoken aloud.

But there is no one in the next room.

And so the thought remains mine.

How many thoughts, I wonder, have died in this manner?

How many small joys have disappeared because there was no one to receive them?

We speak often of the great tragedies of human existence: death, illness, betrayal, poverty. But there are smaller tragedies that occur so quietly that they scarcely qualify as events.

A joke that is never told.

A meal eaten without conversation.

A good day that ends without anyone knowing it was good.

A bad day that ends in precisely the same manner.

These things do not destroy a man.

That is perhaps what makes them so difficult to explain.

They merely accumulate.

And one day he discovers that his life has become something he experiences almost entirely in private.

I have worked hard.

I have pursued education, employment, professional distinction, and the ordinary securities that society teaches us to desire.

I do not regret these pursuits.

Money is not meaningless. Only someone sufficiently protected from its absence could make such a foolish declaration. Money provides security, dignity, choices, and relief from certain humiliations.

Achievement, too, has its value. There is satisfaction in difficult work, in mastering something previously beyond one’s understanding, in contributing even a little to the vast accumulation of human knowledge.

But I have begun to suspect that I asked these things to perform a task for which they were never designed.

I expected success to make me happy.

Not merely satisfied.

Happy.

As though happiness were a destination to which one might eventually be admitted upon presenting sufficient evidence of accomplishment.

Another degree.

Another position.

Another publication.

Another increase in income.

Another country.

Another achievement.

And then, surely, the promised happiness would arrive.

But happiness is an extraordinarily disobedient creature.

It refuses to appear merely because the conditions for its arrival have been fulfilled.

One can possess everything one once considered necessary and discover that necessity was never the same as sufficiency.

What, then, is missing?

People, I suppose.

But even this answer is too simple.

For one may be surrounded by people and remain profoundly alone. One may attend gatherings, exchange messages, participate in conversations, and return home feeling more isolated than before.

It is not the mere presence of others that I miss.

It is the experience of being known.

To be known! What a frightening and magnificent condition.

To have another person understand the meaning of one’s silences. To be recognized not merely through accomplishments or usefulness, but through the ordinary, unremarkable continuity of being oneself.

And here I encounter another contradiction.

For I have spent years constructing an independent identity, becoming capable, self-sufficient, and increasingly reluctant to depend upon anyone.

Yet perhaps dependence, in some measure, is not the humiliation I once imagined.

Perhaps it is an unavoidable part of being human.

We do not become less complete because we need others.

We become less human when we pretend that we do not.

Still, I must be careful.

There is a temptation, particularly among lonely men, to transform companionship into a kind of salvation. To imagine that another person might arrive and resolve every contradiction, illuminate every darkened room, and finally provide the meaning that has eluded us.

But that would be another injustice.

No human being should be made responsible for rescuing another from the entire burden of existence.

Love is not a cure for consciousness.

Companionship does not abolish suffering.

And perhaps the desire to be understood completely is itself unreasonable, for we scarcely understand ourselves.

Yet between demanding salvation and accepting absolute solitude, surely there must be some more modest possibility.

Someone to share an ordinary evening.

Someone whose presence does not require performance.

Someone before whom one need not be accomplished, impressive, productive, or even particularly interesting.

Someone with whom silence is not evidence of absence.

I have begun to think that this last distinction matters most.

There is a silence that separates people, and there is a silence that joins them.

The first is the silence of an empty house.

The second is the silence of two people who need not speak to know that neither is alone.

And perhaps all my ambitions, all my movements between countries, all my labor toward a future I imagined would be extraordinary, have brought me to the embarrassingly ordinary realization that I desire the second.

How humiliating for a man who once believed himself destined for great things!

But perhaps greatness has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps there is no shame in wanting an ordinary life alongside an extraordinary one.

Perhaps one can desire both achievement and affection, independence and intimacy, solitude and companionship.

Perhaps the contradiction need not be resolved.

Tonight, however, the house is quiet.

I have finished my work.

There is nothing particularly wrong.

And yet I feel the absence of something I cannot purchase, manufacture, or achieve through discipline.

I could call someone, certainly. I could make plans. I could leave the house. Loneliness is not always an inescapable sentence, and I must not pretend that it is.

But there is a difference between arranging company and belonging to someone else’s ordinary life.

It is the latter that troubles me.

For I have become quite good at living alone.

And I am beginning to fear that becoming good at something does not necessarily mean that it is good for me.

Still here.