Aloneness

“The Blessed Damozel”: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1875–1878). Wikipedia.

I’ve lived alone for the past ten years and at intervals before that, meaning there is no other body in my house. Paired, we are alone sometimes, but not reliably, because this other person may always appear and usually has a claim on our attention. It took me a while to get used to living alone, and a little while longer to realize I was not lonely. I was alone.

We live in a Noah’s Ark society where the expectation is that everyone, but especially women, will be paired. Some of this is economically driven; since women still make 86 cents to the men’s one dollar it is not easy to be self-sustaining, especially at the level to which we may have become accustomed as daughters of wealthy fathers. In spite of decades of fighting, the Equal Rights Amendment has never been passed by Congress and I expect it never will be. It’s easier to control us if we need somebody else’s money, which makes the courage of young women threatened with expulsion from their colleges because of their protests even more commendable.

That Bachelor’s degree, now threatened, is more essential to women than it is to men. The return on the investment a college degree represents is 9.88 for women, 9.06 for men, and that’s without factoring in the invaluable social connections. We work harder, we earn 3 percent more degrees, and every one of these advantages, offsetting multiple societal disadvantages, makes it more possible for us to choose to live alone.

But self-sufficiency is not only or even primarily economic. We must work to learn to be emotionally and intellectually self-sufficient; this does not mean no friends, nor connection to a community, both of which are always essential. It does mean managing anxiety and worry that focus our attention on others in the familiar female way. Meditation, prayer, and a sense of humor are invaluable tools and an ability to remember and cultivate that moment when, turning from anxiety and worry, we picked up a book—that tremendous relief.

Alone, we have—even with full-time employment and childcare—hours and hours that otherwise would not be ours, hours that would be spent on socializing, chatting, making lives for other people. And to read, really read, we need more than those ten drowsy minutes in bed at the end of the day. We need core time: that alert and lively time that happens between ten AM and two PM, precious hours that should not be devoured by cell phone chatter and errands.

Friday, as I finished the first draft of my eighteenth Cowboy Tale called “Cowboy and The Marriage,” I had a whole afternoon to read (though it did mean converting my anxiety about my dog Pip who was wandering somewhere outside). Because the first lines in my mind when I work up that morning were Adrienne Rich’s “The wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth” from “Diving into the Wreck” written in 1972, the year the feminist movement broke on me with full force, I had just gone back to browsing in her Poems Selected and New, 1950-1974 and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995.

This later collection begins with a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, that superb tale of our society, miserably traduced in several movies: “He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.”

Any solid sense I might once have had of my place in a structured society has long since crumbled. Now the change is all around us, beginning with Black Lives Matter, and it will not be halted no matter how fierce the fight against it. Gatsby wanted Daisy, that golden girl, and almost got her; we want some version of that gold but now we will only find it in the blessed aloneness that allows us to read.

And yes, of course there will be moments, sharp-pointed moments, often as daylight turns to dusk, when we wish for the comfort that other people sometimes bring, but we will remember that it comes at a high cost. For every drop of emotional comfort, there are many drops of boredom and disappointment when we look back on a day when literally we haven’t had a moment to read.

In Women, Writing Adrienne Rich Single Blessedness