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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Alone we are alive.
Alone does not necessarily mean in solitude: we are not just the lone figure on the far shore. This is a populous world and we are most often alone in a crowd. It is a state less of body than mind. The word alone should not, for us, ring cold and hollow but hot. Pulsing with potentiality. Alone as in distinct. Alone as in, Alone in his field. As in, Stand alone. As in, like it or not, Leave me alone. This word wants rescuing, this word wants pride. This word wants to be washed and shined.
There are books, out there, about solitude. They give instructions on being alone. These books talk of "stealing away," of "retreats" and of "seeking sanctuary." They pose solitude as novelty and a desperate act: the work of thieves and refugees. But for loners, the idea of solitude is not some stark departure from our normal state. We do not need writers to tell us how how lovely apartness is, how sacred it was to the sages, what it did for Thoreau, that we must demand it. Those books are not for loners, not really. This is not one of those books.
By the way, I am sane. People whose job it is to know these things have told me so.
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We loners do not know each other by sight. Every day we pass our brethren in the street unwitting. Sure, you might notice the solitary figure on the subway car and think, Aha. But we do not exchange glances or high-fives or have our own slang or symbols. What would those be, anyway? The Tarot's Hermit card? A stick figure wearing a party hat? A tiny, tightly rolled scroll in a silver capsule like Jewish mezuzahs, inscribed with the names of famous loners? Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Alec Guinness, Erik Satie, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Stanley Kubrick, James Michener, Greta Garbo, John Lennon, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Janet Reno, St. Anthony. Batman. Even that would be reductive. Would leave out so much.
Because it is all too easy to generalize. About them. About us. If this is a manifesto, it speaks for all of those -- and we know who we are -- for whom no one has yet spoken and who, by nature, do not seek to call attention to themselves. As a journalist, I have covered hundreds of subjects, reported on thousands of people, ways of life, cultures, subcultures, cults, habits, hobbies, ripples, rites, beginnings, ends. Towns where on certain days every year snakes deluge the streets, then slither off at dusk. Towns whose most famous incidents are massacres. Towns whose churches are built under the surface of the earth, whose hotels are carved out of ice, whose residents are waiting for spacecraft to land. Towns burned to the ground and towns drowned. And yet, in all this, never did I hear the voices or see phalanxes of what is as surely my own kind as rock-'n'-roll fans or Jews or people from Los Angeles. No one had linked us, threaded us like beads on one strand. Someone should. Because we have a point. We form a chorus, but the oddest chorus in the world, a willful antichorus. In saying entirely different things, usually not saying them aloud to anyone at all, we are saying a lot.
Which is why a manifesto for loners cannot pretend to speak for every last loner word for word. Generalization is impossible. It is an insult. Instead what you will find here -- the fact, opinion, research, interview, reportage, analysis and observation -- is a periscope. This is the world from here. Held up to every loner's eye, the view will be the same but different.
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The mob wants friends along when doing errands, working out at the gym, at the movies. The mob depends on advice. Eating alone in decent restaurants horrifies the mob, saddens the mob, embarrasses the mob. The mob wants friends.
The mob needs to be loved.
It lives to be loved.
Or hated, with that conjoined fervor with which mobs face their enemies. Both love and hate are all about engagement. About being linked with humanity generally, as a policy. Loners have nothing against love but are more careful about it. Sometimes just one fantastic someone is enough. As a minority, we puzzle over nonloners, their strange values. Why do they require constant affirmation, validation, company, support? Are they babies or what? What bothers them about being alone? What are they so afraid of? Why can't they be more like us?
Well, they cannot, nor can we be like them. Behavioral geneticists claim that human temperaments and talents -- skills, preferences, modes -- are inborn, like eye color. This science is comforting insofar as it frees our parents from feeling that having loners as children is their "fault," that they "did something" to "cause" this.
Was I born this way? Or am I a loner because I am an only child? My friend Elaine is one of seven children and she is the most lonerish loner I have ever met. Stephen Zanichkowsky is a loner. His memoir, "Fourteen," is about growing up with thirteen siblings.
Does it matter how I got this way? Not if I am happy. I am. Loners need no more to be cured, nor can be cured -- the word is gross in this usage -- than gays and lesbians. Or people who love golf.
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