Loneliness and Solitude are on different dimensions

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, sociology, loneliness, short biographies

I was seventeen, a member of a folk music group, and I'd been asked to join a small (five-member) Dixieland band made up of boys at my high school. Their clarinetist wanted to play saxophone and I wasn't too shabby a clarinet player. I could also play banjo. The folk group was breaking up because two of the guys were going away to college, so I was glad to have another music group to join.

After a number of practice sessions over a couple of months, the other members held a meeting but didn't ask me; I heard about it almost by chance from one of them. I went anyway, thinking it an oversight. The other guys were all in Explorer Scout uniforms with numerous merit badges on their sashes and other insignia. There was also a cameraman there and a reporter!

I knew they were all Explorer Scouts, and they knew I'd been a Boy Scout but inactive for a few years. They'd never invited me to join up as an Explorer; I was soon to find out why. The five of them were the entire membership of an Explorer Post, and they had all achieved Eagle Scout status that year, the only such Post in history. A newspaper story was being prepared.

Once I'd taken in all the facts, I sidled away and went home. I never spent time again with any of them. That day was the loneliest day I'd ever experienced. To use a term apparently coined by Richard Deming, it was my first experience of Exquisite Loneliness: loneliness that can make or break you, but it will surely change you. Deming explores this dimension of loneliness in This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity.

Loneliness is not solitude. Being alone can be restorative (is sure is for me!). Being in a crowd is different from being with a crowd, or with some people in a crowded situation. Loneliness happens more frequently when we're among others than when we're alone. I've experienced perhaps the usual amount of loneliness, but, fortunately, only a few incidents of such overwhelming loneliness.

Several years after high school, bushwhacked by a different kind of betrayal, I was making plans to clean up my affairs and head for the hills. Vague ideas of being like Jeremiah Johnson (a movie mountain man) flitted through my head. Fortunately, I had one friend left, though we'd been out of contact for months. I wanted to see him before I left town. I called, and he came over.

As background for what comes next, it's helpful to know that I had been a Christian for nine years, but part of the betrayal I mentioned led me to pull away from the church congregation. I was badly enough hurt that I'd decided to abandon "church". My friend's first words were, "Guess what happened to me while you were away? I got saved!" I blurted, "How did that happen?" (I'd thought it impossible) He told me of a different church without the troubles I'd seen where I'd been. I went, and he and I have been "in the church life" for 51 years and counting.

Being active in a congregation of believers doesn't eliminate loneliness but it helps.

Richard Deming had things a lot rougher than I did growing up. I had a short spell of heavy alcohol use, then gave it up. I experimented with drugs just a tiny bit, and abandoned that. I don't like things that mess with my mind. Deming became a blackout drunk and at one point spent a night in jail over it. Having read his confessions to us, I am still not sure how much loneliness he suffered because of repeated, crushing experiences, and how much he is predisposed to more loneliness than "average", whatever that might be. His book explores the lives of six creative people—a psychoanalyst and writer, a painter, a photographer, two other writers of different genres, and a screenwriter; all of them celebrated in their time, or part of it—, all of whom experienced and expressed great loneliness. All of them morphed their loneliness into creative genius.

I also wonder, what is the proportion of people who experience "exquisite loneliness" and are broken by it, rather than motivated to heal? …or at least to grow?

As an introvert (INTP in Myers-Briggs terms), I enjoy social experiences, and I also enjoy periods of solitude. At a leadership training camp I was paired with my M-B opposite, a man who is ESFJ. He is almost compelled to sociality and suffers from solitude. I suppose the world needs us both.

Deming is a writer who, in self-revelation, motivates his reader to self-examination. That's valuable. Loneliness isn't a "problem" to be "solved". It's a signal that we need to reassess something. Over time, we might gain sufficient wisdom to know what to reassess.