There's no idle chatter, no white noise and no need to get out of your pyjamas. Phil Daoust extols the virtues of seclusion. YOU don't get many casual visitors where I live. Home is down a dirt track, three kilometres from the nearest village. The neighbours are five minutes' walk away, and when the woods are in leaf you can't see another building. By day you may hear a chainsaw in the distance; by night only the deer barking. I'm on my own here, if you don't count the cat, and right now it's a week since I saw another human. But it's a beautiful spot, in a lovely bit of France, and every now and again a rambler will find his way to it. If I'm outside, and don't have time to hide, his first remark will usually be: "This is a little bit of heaven." I'll feel a little bashful, as if I somehow shaped this world with my own talented hands, and then he'll say: "Mind you, I could never live here."
Now, I'm not an anchorite. I do have a car, a landline, an internet connection. Neighbours come for dinner, my daughter visits for long weekends, and in school holidays friends arrive with their children. But when I explain this, it doesn't cut any ice. Poor sod, I see people thinking. He lives on his own. In this emptiness! You know what, though? It can be marvellous. For some of us, as Anneli Rufus puts it, solitude is "just what we need, the way tuna need the sea. Here we are, not sad, not lonely, having the time of our lives." You haven't heard of Rufus? She's the American author of Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto, a fierce defence of all us misunderstood and misrepresented independent spirits. Being alone, she says, "feels calming to me, and invigorating, and most of all normal". What's so great about the life less shared? Let's start with a trivial example. I'm writing this article in my pyjamas, though it's late afternoon. I've brushed my teeth and shuffled into some slippers but I haven't washed or broken out the deodorant. If I shared my home with someone, I'd be dressed by now - not because I wanted to but because it would be expected. If a stranger were to knock at the door, I'd probably feel obliged to make up some lie about being ill. That may seem like a petty hardship - it is a petty hardship - but so long as no one else suffers there's a lot to be said for doing precisely what you want, when you want, how you want. Richard Byrd would back me up on that. In 1934, the great explorer spent five months alone in a hut in Antarctica, manning the southernmost outpost of an American expedition. His wife and four children were in the US; the nearest human was 200 kilometres away. After a few months of splendid isolation, Byrd felt able to draw some conclusions. "Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others," he wrote in his bestselling book Alone. "My table manners are atrocious - in this respect I've slipped back hundreds of years; in fact, I have no manners whatsoever. If I feel like it, I eat with my fingers, or out of a can, or standing up - in other words, whichever is easiest. What's left over, I just heave into the slop pail, close to my feet." Is there anyone who lives on their own, with a sink full of dirty crockery, who can't relate to that? Then there's the quiet. I moved from Britain to France to be nearer my daughter, who was growing up here with my ex. But if I ended up in such seclusion, it wasn't because I was a stupid foreigner leaping on the first shack the estate agent suggested. We loners are driven to escape the empty chatter that fills most lives. We may occasionally catch ourselves talking to our pets, or muttering when we can't do the crossword, but we don't want endless conversations about the price of Friskies or how we thought it was going to be nice but actually it turned out a bit cloudy. We may not get around to thinking deep thoughts, plumbing the depths of our souls, getting in touch with our muses, but that will be down to indolence or insensitivity, not to the white noise that fills more sociable heads. And every now and again, one of us does get around to producing that great work, like Sara Maitland with A Book of Silence. Divorced, her two children long since grown up and gone, she lives on a Scottish moor with a little dog called Zoe. Her neighbours are barn owls. She has no TV, radio, hi-fi or mobile phone and tries to limit all social activities to six days a month. I attempted to have a chat with her, but - unsurprisingly - she never replied to my emails. Maitland's book, however, explains how she, a deeply committed Christian, spends three hours a day praying. She has fallen in love with silence. It "can be calm or frightening, lonely or joyful, deep or thin. There is religious silence; a self-emptying silence, and romantic silence - what Wordsworth called the 'bliss of solitude'." The bliss of solitude! If it wasn't for the fact that neither of them enjoys heart-to-hearts, she'd have plenty to chew over with Rufus. Rufus says she finds socialising as exhausting as giving blood: "After three hours I'm drained, even if I love the person I'm with. People assume we loners are misanthropes, just sitting thinking, 'Oh, people are such a bunch of assholes,' but it's really not like that. We just have a smaller tolerance for what it takes to be with others. It means having to perform. I get so tired of communicating." Remarkably, Rufus is married and lives with her husband. People call her a hypocrite, she says, but her husband's a loner, too, and their lives are as separate as cohabiters' can be. "We don't have people over, or do things in groups, and when we're at home together we'll often be at different ends of the house. We're not here sitting talking all day and playing games." Once you've finished with that vision of domestic bliss, meet another great introspector - the Canadian Bob Kull, who chronicled his own retreat from society in Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes. In 2001, Kull's desire to understand himself and the world took him to an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile, 150 kilometres from the nearest settlement. He spent just one year there, building a home, fishing, collecting firewood, pulling his own rotten teeth, getting in touch with nature. He had just one visit, from a group of officials checking that the "lunatic gringo" would survive the winter. It was hard and dangerous, especially for a middle-aged man with a prosthetic leg. As well as the elements and assorted injuries, he had to contend with mood swings. "We all carry some pretty dark shadow material in us, and it starts to bubble up," he says. But he got through it, though one call on the satellite phone would have brought a boat to whisk him away. Rufus, Byrd, Maitland, Kull, all those around-the-world sailors, all those buckskinned mavericks who trapped and traded their way across the New World: they show that solitude can be not just survived but embraced. It helps, of course, that this was something they chose. It must be immeasurably harder if you find yourself alone because of bereavement, old age or the end of a love affair. That's not a life anyone would envy. Nor would you want to cut yourself off from the world when your health begins to fail. Yet most people find it hard to contemplate even the kind of watered-down, voluntary solitude that my life consists of. "People who are not this way really don't get it," Rufus suggests. "And when you don't understand something you fear it." According to the anthropologist Robert Sussman, humans evolved not as hunters - as we like to imagine - but as prey, easy meat for wild dogs, crocodiles and hyenas. We became "social animals", as biologists describe us, not to catch dinner but to avoid becoming it - out of fear, in other words. Perhaps that fear still marks us and perhaps that's why we still feel uneasy when there's no one around to watch our backs. I asked a few friends when they had last spent 24 hours without human company. A few people suggested that, they guessed, it might possibly, perhaps have occurred a decade or two ago, when they were living on their own, or sharing with friends who had pushed off for the weekend. They were definitely ill, or they'd have invited someone over, or gone a-visiting. Are people uncomfortable with solitude because they so rarely experience it, or do they so rarely experience it because they are uncomfortable with it? What is clear is that most of us persist in equating aloneness with loneliness and company with companionship, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary. "We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers," is how Henry David Thoreau put it after two years as the sole inhabitant of a house he had built in the Massachusetts woods. You're never more alone than when you're in a crowd. A cliche, perhaps, but most of us recognise the truth in it. Before moving to the back of beyond, I spent almost 40 years surrounded by people, first as one of five children, then in shared houses and, finally, in a succession of flats. I sometimes feel unloved now but I sometimes felt unloved then. Doesn't everyone? Do explorers and hermits miss those they leave behind? Of course they do. "I can't take my loneliness casually," Byrd wrote. "It is too big. But I must not dwell on it. Otherwise I am undone." Maitland admits: "There are times when you need somebody's hand to hold." But the reality of solitude is often less daunting than the perception. During his year on the desert island, Kull, a likeable man, was buffeted by loneliness. But he came to regard his longings as a storm that would sweep in, turn everything upside down, then sweep out again. The best thing was simply to enjoy the spectacle: "Instead of running from that feeling of loneliness, whenever I allow myself to settle into it, and really, fully experience it, it opens out into a sense of wonder and peace." After three or four months, he recalls, "I became more engaged with the world around me - the trees, the ocean, the sky. My whole orientation changed. We are social beings - there's no doubt of that. But even when we're alone, we're engaging with the world." In the 1980s and '90s, a British man called Les Powles sailed three times around the world - always single-handedly, once non-stop. He couldn't afford a radio transmitter, and on his greatest adventure he didn't speak to anyone for 329 days. At 84, his circumnavigating days are now behind him but he still lives on his boat, the Solitaire. What's the appeal of sailing, I asked him. "It's the solitude. When you're out at sea on your own, there's no government or bankers to worry about. You're not responsible to anyone but yourself." Powles has been married twice and has friends in many countries. Doesn't he miss people? "I get lonely at airports, or saying goodbye to somebody, but not when I'm at sea. There's no comparisons, you see. I'm not seeing people with their families. I'm so isolated out there." There was one moment on that non-stop trip when Powles ended up in tears - on Christmas Day, just off Australia. Friends in Britain had given him a special meal to open on the day, complete with greetings card. "I was lonely then, I must admit. I just wanted to say 'Merry Christmas' to someone." But he'd recovered by the time he reached dry land. "When I got back," he says, "I would have happily set off again." And that's after almost a year of proper hardcore solitude, the sort so few of us will ever experience. The worst we have to fear is a kind of solitude lite, where even if we don't see anyone for a few days we still have the phone, email, Facebook, instant messaging, Twitter. It's a great life if you don't weaken. Every now and again, the need to scratch out a living forces me out of my lair. "A week in London," I tell myself. "I can do that standing on my head." And, to tell the truth, I can. I enjoy the chance to catch up with people. Like many loners, I don't have that many friends but the ones I do have I value. Still, whenever I return home, it's with relief that I shut the door on the world. It's a fantastic place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put on my warmest coat, grab a beer and go outside to watch the sun go down. We loners love our rituals, and this is something I try to do come rain, shine or biting cold. I'll be on my own, of course, but channelling Byrd. On April 14, 1934, with the temperature far below zero, Byrd enjoyed a magical sunset, the ice like platinum, Venus an "unblinking diamond" in the sky. "I paused to listen to the silence," Byrd wrote. "My breath, crystallised as it passed my cheeks, drifted on a breeze gentler than a whisper ... The day was dying, the night being born - but with great peace ... In that instant I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe." There was, you will note, no one standing beside him complaining about the weather. The Guardian |
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