We are all, in the last analysis, alone. And this basic state of solitude is not something we have any choice about. It is, as the poet Rilke says, "not something that one can take or leave. We are solitary. We may delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are so, yes, even to begin by assuming it. Naturally," he goes on to say, "we will turn giddy."
Naturally. How one hates to think of oneself as alone. How one avoids it. It seems to imply rejection or unpopularity. An early wallflower panic still clings to the word. One will be left one fears sitting in a straight-backed chair alone, while all the others are chosen and spinning around with their hot-palmed partners. Some are so frightened today of being alone that they never let it happen. Even if family, friends, and movies should fail, there will still be the radio, or television, or internet to fill the void. Those who used to complain of loneliness, need never be alone any more. Even while cleaning house, one can have soap-opera heroes by one's side. Even daydreaming was more creative than this; it demanded something of oneself and it fed the inner life. Now, instead of planting our solitude with our own dream blossoms, we choke the space with continuous music, chatter, and companionship to which we never listen. It is simply there to fill the vacuum. When the noise stops there is no inner music to take its place. One must re-learn to be alone.
It is a difficult lesson to learn today--to leave one's friends and family and deliberately practice the art of solitude for an hour, or a day, or a week. For most, the break is the most difficult. Parting is inevitably painful, even for a short time. It is like an amputation, some feel. A limb is being torn off, without which one shall be unable to function. And yet, once it is done, one finds there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. It is as if in parting one did actually lose an arm. And then, like a starfish, one grows it anew; one is whole again, complete and round--more whole, even, than before, when one's companions had pieces of one.
It seems to me, when I separate from my own species, that I am nearer to others. Beauty of earth and sea and air mean more to me. I am in harmony with it, melted into the universe, lost in it. For it is not physical solitude that actually separates one from others, but spiritual isolation. It is not the desert island nor the stony wilderness that cuts one off from the people one loves. It is the wilderness in the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others. How often, shaking hands or sharing hugs with friends, I have felt the wilderness stretching between us. Both of us wandering in arid wastes, having lost the springs that nourished us--or having found them dry. Only when one is connected to one's own core is one connected to others, I am beginning to discover. For me, the core, the inner spring, can best be found again through solitude.
As far as the search for solitude is concerned, we live in a negative atmosphere as invisible, as all-pervasive, and as enervating as high humidity on an August afternoon. The wold today does not understand, in either man or woman, the need to be alone. How inexplicable it seems. Anything else will be accepted as a better excuse. If one sets aside time for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement, or a shopping expedition, that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one were to say: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone, one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it--like a secret vice!
Few realize how important these times when one is alone are. Certain springs are tapped only when one is alone. The artist knows she must be alone to create; the writer, to work out thoughts; the musician, to compose; the saint, to pray. One needs this time to find the true essence of one's self: that firm strand which will be the indispensable center of a whole web of human relationships. One must find that inner stillness which Charles Morgan describes as "the stilling of the soul within the activities of the mind and body, so that it might be still as the axis of a revolving wheel is still." This wonderful image is to my mind one we could hold before our eyes. This is an end toward which we could strive.
