Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
“There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else.” Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, describes the moment where we’ve fallen through into somewhere else as a wintering, “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
If this world always finds a way to push us towards aloneness, it is because we’re supposed to be there. When things fall apart, the world invites us to reconsider or regroup or reimagine. But for modern people, who must always be somewhere or, at the very least, on the way, rest and retreat are forms of avoidance and failure.
Our world is built upon a deep contradiction. The untouched and unburdened individual is the freest and most admirable. But they are also the loneliest. And after centuries of gradual separation, we neither know how to be together nor alone. We struggle to get close to ourselves and everybody else.
In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between loneliness and solitude. “Loneliness comes about…when I am one without company.” Solitude “is that human situation in which I keep myself company”. And by “[s]peaking with myself I live together with myself.” In failing to make this distinction, we make a painful error.
Loneliness aims towards itself. It compounds itself because it seeks its annihilation in others and the material world, in a look, an accolade, or a purchase. And when loneliness invariably deepens, its destructive logic tarnishes solitude, the one thing that might be able to save us.
In his essay, On Solitude, Michel de Montaigne writes that solitude, properly understood, is not simply our withdrawal from the world; it is the withdrawal of the world from ourselves:
...it is not enough to withdraw from the mob, not enough to go to another place: we have to withdraw from such attributes of the mob are within us. It is our won self we have to isolate and take back into possession.
Michel de Montaigne
And although the ambition of solitude is to live fully without others:
...let us make our happiness depend on ourselves; let us loose ourselves from the bonds which tie us to other; let us gain power over ourselves to live really and truly alone - and of doing so in contentment.
Michel de Montaigne
Ultimately, solitude brings us back together again because “our own deaths have never frightened us enough”:
Our own affairs have never caused us worry enough, so let us start cudgelling and tormenting our brains over those of our neighbours and those whom we love.
Michel de Montaigne
Hannah Arendt held a similar belief. In that companionship and conversation we develop with ourselves in a healthy solitude, we are not “separated from that plurality which is the world of men and which we call in its most general sense humanity.”
Solitude leads to self-renunciation. In a world with other people, we’re the centre of it all. This is why we feel self-conscious. And when we are alone and conscious of ourselves, our importance dissolves. In quietness and pain, our hearts can feel beyond themselves.
The reason for this was so simply stated by Erich Fromm in The Art of Love:
Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
- Erich Fromm
For Fromm, love of an individual implied a love for all humanity because to love someone is to love the humanity within them. Solitude was essential for Rilke’s understanding of love, too. Rilke strongly believed in the need for “intensified and deepened loneness” in matters of love. In one of his Letters to a Young Poet, he wrote:
So whoever loves must try to act as if he had a great work: he must be much alone and go into himself and collect himself and hold fast to himself; he must work; he must.
R.M. Rilke
Solitude, ironically, is the only avenue towards togetherness. When we find ourselves alone we find that we have been caught up in things that weren’t meant for us. That it will take a great deal of courage and work to become what we are. And that the best chance we have is to be close to each other.
In solitude we learn that we were never alone, and that we always belonged to ourselves. Our loneliness was only ever self-abandonment. We grew lonely because we left ourselves. And only by being alone can we return to ourselves and keep ourselves alive. And if we can find a home here, then we belong in this world, wherever we are.