The Sweet Uses of Solitude

JUNE 1970 | It's separateness that enriches togetherness. Or is it the other way around? 

- Joan Mills

Sometimes it's best to be in company-sometimes better yet to be alone. I believe in both, and when I am surfeited with one, I feel compelled to the other. My pleasures come point-counterpoint. Whenever I am locked into a series of days with a friend or relative-beloved, yes, but who will not, will not, let go-panic rises in me. "I must write a letter," I say, fleeing to my room. The other stands outside my door, relentlessly relaying the news about Berlioz, urban renewal, corn cures, her analysis. I claw the sheets, or hang out the window, panting.

Or I am too much alone. No one comes near. No friend is at home to answer my call or hear me knock, and I need a human contact. I go to market and engage the vegetable man in a discussion of his broccoli; I take the car to the gas station where I am called “dearie” and feel wanted.

In the ordinary rhythm of my life, it’s easy to balance society and solitude. At the far side of every week spent in great part by myself, there is a weekend overflowing with friends and family. When enough of that is quite enough, Monday comes. Then everyone is gone but me.

On Monday mornings, I wander through unpeopled rooms, listening to the large, soft silence, giving myself over to being all alone. It is like a return to having a very private place in which to know oneself, and grow. Children make such retreats for themselves. A towering old pine stands between woods and meadow near our house. Among its branches, in green obscurity, our two sons long ago built a deck of boards now weathered black. I imagine—for I never violated that privacy to see—that they created fanciful adventures there, or sprawled, lax and dreamy, breathing the summer air, sorting sounds, coming to friendly terms with bugs, and brooding upon the stately drift of clouds.