What’s your greatest fear? Mine’s loneliness.

Not pain, penury, shame, even boredom. Not death: how bad can unconsciousness be? But absence of an Other, with whom to share one’s time? Yikes.

Modernity increased the likelihood of loneliness.

We used to live in communities, where everybody knew and counted on each other. The old were not cashiered for their kids’ convenience. Families did not scatter as widely. Everyone was included and would be, at the last, in the local cemetery among familiar names. These days one is boxed – or scattered to the winds.

I just reread John Cheever’s immense short story, “Farewell, My Brother.” I’d forgotten how good it is. That’s the way with the best art. Remembering it fondly, you find it better revisiting. Have you grown in the interval or has it?

The story describes the reunion of a not very happy family in their seaside summer house. While the mother and her four grown children don’t much like each other, they mean more to each other than anyone else on earth. Each is the others’ permanence and purpose – all but the younger brother, whose anger detaches him from the family knot. He wants out. And he achieves it – with a violent yank – dooming himself to live apart, bitter, cocooned in his discontent.

My four siblings and our parents were not close growing up. This is evidently the result our parents sought. The few things we did together were obligatory – church on Sunday, say – which none enjoyed. Both parents bristled at their children laughing together, fearing perhaps we were ganging up. We wish each other happy birthday these days, if we remember, and show up at weddings and funerals, but we do not need one another. My kids’ mom and I reversed that pattern, I’m pretty sure. I feel together with my kids and grandkids, even when we’re not.

Solitude became my habit growing up. There were plenty of people around but mostly I remember being alone. I got used to amusing myself, as I’m doing now, but always with the aim of attracting and attaching an Other. You. Gluttony for affection made me a writer. Writing I am never alone for you are with me, smiling, scowling, egging me on.

Atomization of community intensified the pressure on intimate relations. Partners became everything to each other with family and friends far and wide. Electronic communications are said to bring us nearer, but for me they’ve the opposite effect. Phone call, face call, or text reminds me of absence, not presence, an inability to embrace. Words for me are a more tactile medium. I dispatch my words to wreathe, tickle, smooth. Sounds crazy, I realize, but it’s how I feel.

In my waning years I bob in a luxuriance of love. Jane, my kids, grandkids, you guys, how lucky can I be! I pinch myself with wonderment. All my life I dreaded solitary confinement and now the opposite. I strain to write better to entwine you tighter.

Andrew Marvell in his magical poem is inveigling his reluctant – or “coy” – mistress into bed. His plea resounds in the hearts of all who long to live more intensely together. “Let us,” he cajoles,

Henry James, in The Ambassadors, makes the same passionate pitch differently. “Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to.”

Live, for me, means together. Live alone is an oxymoron.