Fifty Days of Solitude (2 page)

Searching for it, I turned to my collection of her books and spent one evening, and then another, reading the best of her early novels,
Monday Night
, many of her fine short stories in the collection
Fifty Stories
, and two excellent novellas:
The Crazy Hunter
and
The Bridegroom's Body
. I wanted to hear her elegant, light, fictional voice, and now and again I thought I caught it in her prose.

When I saw the inscriptions she had written in these books, with her characteristic back-leaning, dark-black strokes, the kind of slant that suggests a left-handed writer, I wept. Try as I might I could not remember if she was left-handed. I could not recover her lovely, kind speaking voice, although I remembered being always aware of it when I was with her. It was as if the heavy silences in the days I was now living forbid such sound to return. It was the price I had to pay for stern exclusion of other voices; when I wished to hear a beloved one in my mind's ear I could not.

W
E
value most what we have begun to lose: Sight. Hearing. Hair. Teeth. Mobility. Height. Friends. Old age is somewhat like dieting. Every day there is less of us to be observed. It differs from dieting in that we will never gain any of it back; we must settle for what remains and anticipate further losses. I was not being philosophical about this realization, because I was not adjusted to this state of affairs. I saw it as a bald piece of information to be handed down to the confident, the worldly, the strong: in other words, the young.

T
HREE
days without a word to anyone. I have written each day to S., so I
feel
as if we have spoken, but since there were no answers (she is a poor correspondent), I am not sure. I picked up my mail at the post office and made a point to smile and nod to Carol, the new postmistress, but did not speak. I did not intend to be rude. It was that I suddenly was unsure of my voice, considering it might sound odd from misuse, or not knowing
how
it would sound.

I read my mail at home and entered future events and appointments in a new date book which contains, at the start of each month, reproductions of Edward Hopper's paintings and watercolors. Now I knew how I would illustrate my solitude. Hopper must be the only American artist with the power in his pencil and brush to portray aching loneliness on a canvas. I looked at
Early Sunday Morning
for a long time. Painted more than sixty years ago, it shows a long, two-story (Amsterdam Avenue, New York City?), red-brick building, the street-level stores dark, their canvas awnings furled, the only lit object a barber's pole in front of a shop. Upstairs, the beginning of dawn reflected in the windows, I sense the presence, in their absence, of sleepers behind the partly drawn shades and half curtains. And on the edge of the deserted yellow sidewalk stands a fire hydrant, a gray-black sturdy stumplike fixture casting a thin black shadow to parallel the longer one from the barber pole.

No one to be seen, although I know they are there, asleep, the way I know my neighbors are there, each at least two or three acres away from me and shielded from view by woods. The desertion of Hopper's street is made more bitter, intense, by the strict, straight, long line that boxes in the rectangular strip of dull, early-morning sky above the second story.

Another oil,
Two Puritans
, painted fifteen years later: Two white, old (Cape Cod?) houses side by side, one smaller than the other but with the same roofline, the same type of windows, similar doors except that the smaller one is permitted the luxury of a red cover over the door and a stern, red-brick chimney. Both have low white fences with no sign of gates. The larger house has thin, separated curtains on the front windows; otherwise all the windows, in both houses, are black to the eyes of the spectator.

But what makes this painting almost unbearably poignant are three gaunt trees that stand in the small strip of grass in front of the house and the fences. Not a branch protrudes from them; the painter has cut them off before the branching takes place, if it does. It is possible that nothing happens above that point, that they stretch on and on in their barrenness into the gray sky. They are motionless, sharp, concentrated signs of absence and desertion, within the house as well as without.

The enclosure of the houses is absolute: there are no gates to the continuous white fences. And the presence of absent (to us) persons can be sensed behind the curtains, in the black spaces that obscure the inhabitants, I surmise.

Sometimes Hopper uses figures, sad, black-outlined figures, to populate his pictures, but in one case,
Summer Evening
, he said he did not think of adding the figures of the young man and woman on the gaunt, late-night, unfurnished porch, until he had started the work. He was only interested in “the light streaming down, and the night all around.”

I think he felt he could rely on empty streets, unpeopled buildings, bare tree trunks, blank windows, black tunnels, and subway exits to teach us about the terrible and beautiful isolation of nature and the human condition. Living in the world, he says, we are nonetheless alone and lonely.

Hopper is the illustrator of Virginia Woolf's dictum: “On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.”

T
HIS
morning I realized I was not alone. The two men I was writing about in the novel called “Untitled” (in its contract) were having breakfast with me. I was asking them questions about themselves because I did not know what they were feeling, honestly feeling, at the moment I wished to take their story up again when I got back to my study. I saw their blond heads but their voices were too low for me to catch their talk; perhaps they were not talking and I was only wishing they would.

Benjamin Sachs, in Paul Auster's recent novel
Leviathan
says: “The two times I've sat down and written a novel, I've been cut off from the rest of the world, first in jail when I was a kid [he had been a conscientious objector], and now up here in Vermont, living like a hermit in the woods. I wonder what the hell it means.”

Peter Aaron responds: “It means you can't live without other people.… When they're there for you in the flesh, the real world is sufficient. When you're alone, you have to invent imaginary characters. You need them for companionship.”

So. Solitude is the proper condition for the creation of fictional characters, to keep me company, as the boys did this morning at breakfast. The longer I stayed alone, I reasoned, the greater the imaginary population of the house, the richer the fiction. If I allowed real persons to come in through the front door, they would be enough to occupy and satisfy me. I would be lost to the invented commonalty from my head.

S
NOW:
In mid January it arrived stealthily during the night while I slept. The first storm was merely half a foot, but it covered everything except, of course, the gray water of the cove and the protuberant rocks which were now black. It was as if a curtain had fallen on a colorful stage set and then risen on one entirely devoid of color, with only shapes to break the white monotony.

It was a most fortunate turn of events. There was no impetus to go out, no desire to uncover my car from its white corset and cap, no need for air or exercise or the sight of other persons. The snow urged me inward, to the light over my desk, to the fire in the woodstove, toward the warm, inner core of self so insulated and protected from “going out” by the snow cover that it suggested something unexpected to write about and the right way to express it.

I
WORKED
hard the day of the first storm, feeling very pure and in tune with the climate. I thought of what Annie Fields quoted (from Aristotle) to Willa Cather in a letter: “Virtue is concerned with action; Art with production.” I was not aspiring to art, but I managed to combine both virtue and production until, in the late afternoon, I was tired out. Then I filled the house with music from the last act of
Tristan and Isolde
, so loud that it obliterated the silent snow and made me feel less virtuous, less desirous of virginal ground cover and needy of some kind of warmth, some sexual reassurance. Oh well. I went up to my solitary bed, trying to hold fast to the virtues of art that flourishes in solitude and snow.

T
HOMAS SZASZ
(in
The Second Sin
): “Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.”

T
HE
eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in
A Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men
, thought ancient man was an introvert, modern man a social being. “The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgement of others concerning him.”

I wondered if both these observations were true. What evidence do we have of early human self-sufficiency? Were there hermits? Tribal life, nomadic life did not seem to allow for much solitude. Anchorites, I believe, were a Christian phenomenon, following Jesus' example of a long stay in the desert. I remembered that the trial the Maoris of New Zealand inflicted upon their young boys to prove their worthiness to enter manhood was a year alone in the wilderness, surviving all natural dangers and the more unnatural one of solitude. Such a rite of passage made a boy fit to live with the tribe. I wondered if it ever happened that it bred in him a hunger to continue to lead his life alone, in a perpetual walkabout.

But how right Rousseau was about the modern person. Our points of reference are always our neighbors, the people in the village or the city, our acquaintances at school, at games, at work, our close and distant families, all of whom tell us, with their hundreds of tongues, who we are. We are what we were told we were, we believed what we heard from others about our appearance, our behavior, our choices, our opinions. We acted according to all their instructions. Rarely if ever did we think to look within for knowledge of ourselves. Were we afraid? Perhaps, we thought, we would find nothing there. Is a person missing, an entity that can only be formed from evidence provided by someone looking at us?

We were determined by public opinions of us. Would we think we existed without outside confirmation? And how long could we live apart from others before we began to doubt our existence?

The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

The pronouns I was using now, the generalized first person plural I used to think with in the world—we, us, our—came more easily to the pen when such matters as these suddenly concerned me. The first person pronoun makes a statement about our unique singularity of which we are only sure when we are in society. Alone, we hesitate to use it (as I am doing now) because we fear we may be talking behind the back of someone who is not there.

One thing more: Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.

T
HE
L
ONG
L
ONELINESS
by Dorothy Day. When I was alone, I was attracted to that book by its title. Dorothy Day thought that the division between men and women could be made on the curious ground that “women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.”

All this may be true for many women, for those who, in recent years, have flocked to groups offering to raise their consciousness, to workshops promising to teach them to write, to support groups for various afflictions and weaknesses. But for others, and especially for those like me who are “of a certain age,” the call to come to a circle inspires only an irresistible desire to walk away, to learn what I want to know in the quiet which can never be found in a group or a community, to practice in private.

For too long women
have
existed in groups. The communities of families, of our husband's professional associates, of gatherings of other wives and mothers left together after dinner to exchange wisdom about shopping, cooking, children. The long loneliness of which Dorothy Day speaks was felt by some of us only when we were
with
other people. What we yearned for were periods of solitude to renew our worn spirits.

How seldom were most women alone,
left
alone. They went directly from a crowded childhood and young adulthood within the confines of a family to teeming dormitories at colleges and universities. Some avoided those crowds only to be given to husbands, handed over by fathers in a ceremony that emphasized the continuity of their communal existence. I lived more than half a century surrounded in this way.

I recalled two brief periods when I lived alone, the first year of World War II when my husband was drafted, and then the half-year, thirty-one years later, when we separated. With dismay I remember how I wasted those short times: I did everything I could to avoid my empty rooms; I was lonely because I had no experience with solitude. I never realized I had been given a gift; I didn't know how to use the great present of time alone. I read about it later in May Sarton's
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”