Loneliness and solitude

There are many different kinds of loneliness. It’s a state that allows for all kinds of variegation. The expression “being in one’s own company”, or “liking one’s own company”, captures what’s at stake in the whole idea of loneliness and being alone; it puts into ordinary language the sense that, internally, we are more than one.

We’re the person who moves through the world, but there is also someone in our minds, in ourselves, who moves alongside us, providing a kind of companionship as well as a running commentary on the state of our lives. That companion can be somebody that we find congenial; somebody that helps us to be curious about ourselves and interested in the world. When we feel lonely, that companion can be somebody that we’d rather not be with; somebody that seems to offer no solace or interest of any kind. That’s when the experience of the world starts to feel empty and sad.

Loneliness is and feels very different from solitude. Solitude is a state of being alone that is made possible when you have an ongoing and rich relationship between yourself and your inner companion. The British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott describes solitude very well in his essay “The Capacity to Be Alone”.

Loneliness and solitude became very important experiences in literature, particularly with the birth of what we would now call modern literature. Modern literature has many different beginnings, but for our purposes one of the most important is the Romantic period.

Different periods have located the truth of human life and of the world in different places. In early eras, they may have located it in a metaphysical beyond, which we sometimes call God, or which other cultures have other names for. We might also locate it in community. We may say that the collective world that we live in is really where the centre of gravity is, where we locate ourselves, rather than in our individual self.

In the Romantic period, it’s not just a matter of people becoming more interested in interior life. This period gives rise to the idea – which seems so natural in the contemporary West today that we barely question it – that it’s in individual life that the truth of human existence really exists. Transcendence and the highest meanings of humanity are to be found and revealed in the interior life.

There’s an emergence of lyric poetry, which wants to give voice not to the beauty or the strangeness of the external world, but to the landscapes of the mind and of the heart. This inevitably gives rise to an interest in loneliness and solitude, because if the truths of humankind are located in the self, in the interior, then we need to become curious about what happens when we’re on our own; when the mind is in communion with itself; when it’s exploring itself.

This can sound, and often is, quite ecstatic, and it can lead to a state of transcendent peace; but, just as easily, it can be very turbulent and volatile. As more and more thinkers and writers show us, the mind can be a very dangerous, risky place to be. There are writers for whom loneliness connotes peace and joy, and a kind of comfort and reassurance in simply being with oneself. But there are also writers who see this self-companionship as taking us into very risky, volatile territory – very stormy seas.

A primary example of the more ecstatic mode of solitude is in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, an unfinished book by the great 18th century philosopher and hero of the Enlightenment Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In this text, Rousseau takes us on a series of walks in external landscapes, but they’re really walks through the territory of Rousseau’s extraordinary mind and his states of feeling.

There is a total absorption in the present moment, and a filtering out of the outside world and of any changeful states of mind. There is no pain or pleasure; there is no excitement; there isn’t even really a state of peace, insofar as peace is relative to pain. Rousseau tells us that in this state of mind, this is not a provisional or partial happiness, which comes with excitement or pleasure. It’s a total, perfect happiness which is only possible in solitude, because it is a closing of the gap emerging between one’s self and one’s inner companion.

If there is somebody else, then you might experience all kinds of joyous transport, but what you won’t have is that perfect happiness, because another person is a kind of agitation. Another person takes us outside of ourselves and makes us aware that there is something else; another moment in time; a past, a future. To be alone, to be able to absorb oneself totally in the present of one’s interior life, is the only thing that makes this perfect happiness possible.

What caught my attention at the beginning of the first lockdown was just how much cultural commentary seemed to echo that perfect happiness experienced by Rousseau. There was an attentiveness to sensory experience. We were talking about our sense of smell and our sense of hearing being enriched by the quiet, by the absence of a thrumming soundtrack of traffic and industrial noise under the sounds of birdsong and the wind in the trees.

The trouble is that this epiphanic happiness that some of us might have been experiencing is also a symptom in a 24-hour world of a kind of fashion. It was a passing experience; it was something that we were being directed towards; it was almost a passing fad. It was celebrated and commemorated on social media, in the form of photographs on Instagram, or tweets, or little films on YouTube.

The ecstatic celebration of our aloneness was bound to give way to something wearier: a proper difficulty in having to be alone with oneself, in being cut off from the usual sources of social curiosity and interaction. That really started to kick in when we went back into lockdown the second time.