The Long Country: On Being Alone, and Learning to Live There

Loneliness is not a problem with a solution. It is a condition with a meaning. There is a difference, and that difference is everything.A problem can be fixed. You fix a broken faucet. You fix a misquoted invoice. A problem has an outside edge, a defined wound, and a procedure for closing it. But a conditionthe way weather is a condition, the way mortality is a conditionasks something altogether different of us. It asks for understanding rather than repair. It asks us to become a certain kind of person rather than to perform a certain kind of action.I wrote these pages over the course of a winter that felt, at times, almost geological in its slowness. There were stretches of days in which I did not speak to another person, not from misanthropy, not from illness, but simply because the circumstances of a life had arranged themselves into a wide, quiet field, and I was standing in it, trying to figure out what fields are for.What I found was not comfort, exactly. It was something older and more useful than comfort. I found that solitudereal solitude, not the solitude of waiting for the phone to ring, but the solitude of genuine presence with oneselfis one of the few experiences left in modern life that is entirely ours. No one can monetize it. No one can take a photograph of it that means what it actually means. It belongs to the person inside it completely.I also found, in the writing of these chapters, that the Western tradition has spent a thousand years confusing aloneness with failure. The monk in his cell was the exception, not the model. The hermit was the cautionary tale. The person who preferred solitude was considered either saintly or broken, and we have continued to hold those two poles like electrodes, running a current of suspicion between them.I want to propose a third option. Not saint, not broken. Just a person who has learned, through difficulty or circumstance or simple attention, that the company of one's own mind can bewhen tended carefully, when furnished slowly, when treated with the same seriousness we'd give any relationship that mattersone of the richest habitations available to a human being.These chapters move the way a long walk moves. They circle back. They stop at unexpected things. They are not organized as steps toward a destination but as rooms in a house you are slowly learning is yours.You do not have to have lost someone to read this. You do not have to have been abandoned or divorced or moved to a new city where you know no one. You only have to have noticed, at some point, that there is a self somewhere inside you that you have not fully metand that meeting it feels less like a project and more like a journey, and that journeys, if they are honest, go into difficult country.This is that country.Welcome to it. Read more