There is a form of being together that feels as simple and expansive as being alone, when your experience is not crushed or closed by the presence of the other but deepened and expanded. Such friendship is very rare and very precious. All other companies, no matter how beloved, reach their peak and begin to wither. If someone is an introvert, that point comes quickly and violently. Returning to solitude feels like a rapture.
Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) supports this delightful relief with great charm and poetic interest in the original piece. Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library) – his 1935 essay that was, and a century later, the wonder of the poet Ross Gay. A book of entertainment.
Although he published twenty-two books in twenty years, as well as many essays, poems, and newspaper articles – so much is possible only in a deep and uninterrupted solitude, influenced by Susan Sontag’s cry that “one cannot be alone to write” – Macaulay was there is no witch. He gave speeches, attended meetings, held parties, and often appeared on the radio to explain clearly the state of affairs in the world. During WWI, she worked as a nurse and civil servant. During WWII, like Marie Curie before the war, she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of sixty. He regularly writes to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary – his favorite publication – with suggestions, corrections, and corrections. (“To prepare this great work pleases me,” he wrote in one of these stories about the small and deep pleasures of life.) When his house was demolished in the Blitz, all his books were destroyed, it was the volumes of the dictionary that wept. very much. . As he rebuilt his home, he continued to entertain his fellow gymnasts and gymnasts.
But even though he was sociable, Macaulay had the true test of an introvert – not if a person is involved in sports, but if he is guilty or tired of it. In his essay “The Departure of Strangers,” he is enjoying the joy of being left alone:
A lot of peace is found: sleep, golden peace, sweet-sweet honey on top of my house, I wet it, come down like music from the walls, and wander around the ground like trampled herbs. Peace to the gods; godlessness.
[…]
An easy chair stretches out welcoming arms; sofa stretches, no guests; books shine, brown and gold, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; He can throw the floor, the chairs, the mat, once more, lying ready to the hand… The cry of stupid words remains in the air, it is crushed, it dies into oblivion, the breath is blocked. A heavy volume is lifted from the shelf to the sofa. There is silence like a flower falling on the restored kingdom from which the deceivers have left.
What to do with all this kind peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden gem, a piece of heaven’s plan of grace, dropped to earth like a mysterious stray star. A man’s life for himself again. Dear guests, how much you have given, not only in your departure, but in your return, so that we may learn to appreciate your absence, to content ourselves with joy in your absence.
Ironically, even Macaulay’s museum was a visitor that needed a break. In another article, he gives a similar internal response to finishing a book – the moment when, by writing the last words on the last page, the mind is empty. He wrote:
Breath spreads before my bright eyes, a halcyon sea, soon to be troubled with the flotsam and jetsam of long-neglected intentions, which, I know, will soon reappear when I start out on the deceptive, alluring sea. Relaxation is now a small business, and going back to the past are the days that seemed to spread, blue and endless, between one job and another. There are constant babbles, unchanging, no doubt will not happen, and I put mocking, rude heads, so that, even if I am lazy, I will be lazy among poor people, whom care wants to kill. But now, having just come out of the heavy and heavy forest that has so long fascinated me, I will think of the sweet and limitless slugging, the leisure and freedom of the lotus-eaters or the gods.
Two of which are May Sarton’s remarkable ability to live alone since Macaulay’s time. Personal Entertainmentthen return to Olivia Laing’s modern art of being alone in the crowd with Stephen Batchelor’s field guide for private enjoyment.