Samuel Johnson, notoriously, hated being alone. Solitude to him not only invariably provoked his bouts of depression, but he saw it as something fundamentally corrupting and suspicious. He described the “solitary mortal” as “certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad”. Solitude to him was “dangerous to reason, without being favourable to virtue”. In his imagination, one supposes, seclusion was a hothouse producing the febrile, disordered fantasies of cranky, treasonous Whigs and republicans. It was both personally disarming and politically troublesome. As such, he was famously open to entertaining any guest, no matter how slight the acquaintance, until any time of the night. He would often beg the last guest to stay so as to stave off the dreary purdah of his own company, company that the fashionable classes so craved for, for as long as possible.
I think that Johnson’s hearty disdain for isolation reflects a powerful current in the English character. One detects in Johnson’s eighteenth century attitude twinges of the characteristic distrust of such detachment found in the bracing attitudes of pioneering, tyrannical nineteenth century public school headmasters such as Edward Tring of Uppingham, say, or Edward Lyttleton of Eton. To them, a penchant for one’s own company was inherently subversive, a symptom, along with excessive reading and masturbation, of a lurking anti-social tendency that had to be stamped out in the course of the moral formation of the upstanding denizens of Britain and the Empire. Enforced games-playing, the House system, constant supervision and cold showers were enlisted as conscripts in the war against furtiveness, seclusion and sensitivity.
This is far from being the case only amongst the upper classes. Natural suspicion falls in British life upon anyone who displays a proclivity towards solitude, beginning early in life. There is no more damning analysis of a child or adolescent’s character than “he spends an awful lot of time alone up in his room”. Children of all classes who show a fundamental indifference to the company of others are perceived as worrisome, and are usually, in a similar way as the domineering Headmaster of Harrow or Wellington might force recalcitrant students into unwanted games of rugby, dragooned into some communal activity that they are not the slightest bit interested in.
This is usually done with the best of intentions, by the most loving of parents. Excessive isolation is seen to be either a cause or a symptom, or possibly both, of unhappiness and unhealthiness, and therefore in need of remedy. Even my parents made attempts (admittedly fairly desultory and half-hearted ones) to lure me from my self-imposed infant exile from humanity, at one point trying to persuade me of the virtues of joining the Cubs or Scouts. I had no intention whatsoever of engaging with such an organisation, and I’m not even sure if I ever got as far as being forced to attend one meeting. My parents not being the most compulsively social people themselves, and certainly not wanting to force me into anything that would make me unhappy, gave up, mercifully with very little resistance.
I think that this obsession with society (in the literal sense of being in the company of others), with ‘mixing’, is rooted in a fundamental idea that happiness is only achievable through other people. Emotional investments and bonds in other people are the only root to happiness. Because, ultimately, what is the alternative? Some kind of solitary debauchment? Or even worse, knowledge and facts and ideas?
Therein lies the British obsession with the dangers of solitude; the association with, in its broadest sense, subversion. It links into our much-vaunted distrust of intellectuals, who, squirrelled away, scratching into midnight with their treasonous quills, disturb solid moral and political common sense with their over-analysis and perhaps even unpatriotic ways. The solitary, it is always feared, is prone to dis-ease, perhaps with himself but also with the status quo in general. The projections of this dis-ease onto society manifest themselves in some kind of radicalism, either nihilistic or (in an irony noted by the splendidly grumpy Bernard Shaw’s self-description as the ‘antisocial socialist’) socialistic, and the projections onto the individual manifest themselves in morally questionable debauchment, the luxury, superstition and madness of which Dr Johnson was so apprehensive.
However, there is another aspect to this, which links more directly into the obsession with finding fulfilment or happiness primarily or solely through other people. There is a pervasive suspicion that unless one’s primary source of satisfaction is some relationship with another person or other people, particularly but not exclusively a monogamous sexual relationship, one is not a normal human being. Sneaking terror of loneliness projects itself onto the fearful and neurotically hateful attitude towards anyone who lives out the profoundly feared destiny of solitude, a hate which is as much actual or potential self-hatred as anything. This crystallises itself in that extremely common stock-character of British life, real and fictional – the man who lives alone, or perhaps with his mother, his lack of other relationships indicative of or a cover for some seedy and mysterious habit, such as serial killing, wearing mackintoshes into adult cinemas, or listening to Gardeners’ Question Time.
This fear and hatred has heightened in recent years, and not surprisingly. Increasingly, the traditional institutions through which social interaction and stable relationships were initiated and sustained, and loneliness warded off, have been chipped away. The decline of religious observance and Church-going, the break-down of established conventions of marriage and courtship, the decline of the nuclear family, the increased tendency to live alone, and even the decreased vitality of collective institutions of working-class life such as working men’s clubs, pubs, football clubs and trade unions, have given more substance to this terror of solitude. Because the initiation of social interaction and other relationships are less regulated by well-known conventions, the pathways into social bonding and marriage less obvious and negotiated with less certainty and more anxiety, the kernel of our fears has been shown to be more solid than we would like.
Much as this may be seen as a controversial statement, these changes have probably affected men more than, or at least differently from, women. In practice men, most notably heterosexual men, are still usually expected to initiate romantic relationships. You may quibble around this, but any honest assessment of the situation has to conclude that it’s basically true. Therefore, the fact that courtship and marriage are far more marked by uncertainty and less regulated by fixed conventions and rules than they were has had the effect of hitting men harder than women, since this morass of uncertainty is more often negotiated in a proactive way by men. Women have, in general, probably adapted far better, and indeed benefited far more, from the decline of the traditional nuclear family. The collective social institutions of life, particularly working class life, that have been most obviously eroded have been the ones that were male-dominated. I am not suggesting that women do not still suffer from a great deal of injustice and discrimination in other areas, and some of the developments I have outlined are not bad things. However it still seems to me to be the case that the problem of solitude and fear of isolation, as it has intensified in recent decades, has probably disproportionately affected men. It is significant that the stereotypical figure of the weird loner in fiction and reality is most often male in modern culture. The most famous and well-observed fictional representations of these neuroses since the 1960s are of male characters. Mark Corrigan in ‘Peep Show’, David Brent in ‘The Office’, even Rigsby in ‘Rising Damp’, all personify it. The stereotype of the crazy cat-loving spinster still exists, but it is nowhere near as prominent in the modern imagination as the male equivalent.
What is needed to moderate and correct this picture, however, is a sane attempt to appreciate the many pleasures of solitude. I am sure that this is partly a temperamental preference, based on personality as much as any universally applicable argument, but I am unable to function without long periods of isolation, and I’m sure that the benefits of solitude are capable of wider appreciation.
The joys of being away from other people are many. You do not have to regulate your life according to the whims of someone else, whose preferences are never likely to accord with your own. Compromise is much less necessary. You can get on with serious and uninterrupted reading and study. Most of all, you don’t have to constantly fret about others’ perceptions of you. You can be uninhibitedly yourself. If you want to talk to yourself in order to better think something through, or if you want to drink tea out of a pint glass, or eat raw jelly cubes out of the packet, you can do so without having to explain yourself. This may be a recipe for some degree of eccentricity, but by heavens to murgatroid, it sure is liberating.
Furthermore, you don’t have to feign interest in the tedious things that other people have been doing with their day. You can free yourself from the annoyance that is other people. Almost all people annoy me. Even people I like very much or even love often annoy and infuriate me. Most people do so without any compensation. They witter on with their unintelligent, overly sentimental, priggish, petty or ill-considered opinions, feelings or other outpourings, and frankly I could do without it. As my favourite philosopher Schopenhauer put it:
The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,—the less, indeed, other people can be to him.
Schopenhauer may have put it in perhaps excessively strong terms. Despite my argument, I would not claim that I do not get pleasure out of the company of others. On the contrary, excessive solitude can start, as Dr Johnson held, to drag on one’s spirit. So long as people are my kind of people – cynical, with a dry or inappropriate sense of humour, usually but not necessarily politically motivated, resistant to false emotion, unsentimental and so on – I derive can great rewards from them. As such, I wouldn’t quite go to the extreme of Sartre, for whom hell was other people.
However, I can honestly say that when I finally get some time to myself, even after a prolonged period of interaction with people who entertain me, being left alone again gives me a pleasure of relief and contentment that little else can provide. The cool and unhurried thrill of silence, of being able to think and reflect and not be judged or weighed up, is wonderful. Solitude gives one time to reflect, to give one’s own emotions – whether they be happiness or sadness, frustration or industry, desire or contentment - a space to breathe.
Anyone who knows me who has read this far probably thinks that this piece is an extended bit of self-justification for my notorious and spectacular failure with women. My extensive acquaintance with the joys of solitude is partially attributable, no doubt, to just this. However, I nonetheless do take a genuine pleasure in being alone, and I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t pleasures to be had from relationships with other people, whether sexual or otherwise, pleasures that are conducive to the good life. My point is that they are not the only important pleasures, nor even ones without which happiness is impossible.
However, it seems that the fear of solitude in modern culture has reached a point where many people, especially but not exclusively young people, feel anxious or nervous unless they are with other people the whole time, or nearly the whole time. They may not even particularly enjoy the company of those other people, but the presence of someone else, anyone else, is thought superior to solitude. This is an absurd attitude. My presumption is the other way around. I have a presumption in favour of solitude, unless I can see some way in which the presence of another will improve things. It will sometimes thus improve things, but presuming that it necessarily will is often foolish and always ill-advised, in my experience. A more balanced attitude, which re-examines the very real pleasures and benefit of isolation, may do everyone a favour. Even people less misanthropic and grumpy than me.
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