I’ve the habit of loneliness.

The sentence comes to me out of sleep. I set it down, curious. This is not news. Why tell you? Why now? I am not especially lonely this moment; Jane’s in the next room; I smile hearing her voice. Henry, beside me, tussles with a toy, always good company. I feel you listening. Amply companioned, I am hardly alone. Yet I am sad. Not acutely, unbearably, but pleasantly, sweetly, glad to be sad, if that makes sense. My loneliness is neither complaint nor credit but a constant: my nature.

I wonder how many feel as I do. The Surgeon-General has described loneliness as epidemic in America. That suggests it’s a sickness seeking a cure. For many, it is – debilitating – leading to disease, obesity, antisocial behavior, hypochondria, suicide. Twice it knocked me flat, rendering me useless. Nothing’s scarier. But this isn’t depression. This is a gift – of yearning, awareness, gratitude for life and regret we haven’t more.

Loneliness was anathema in my boyhood home: failure, an embarrassment. Sadness was selfishness, snap out of it, take your temperature, maybe you were sick. One might feel lonely away from home – at school, say – but that was situational, you’d grow out of it. My parents self-medicated – with cocktails – but that was society, not loneliness.

Dogs were my first anodyne for loneliness, then music, then words. You could sport or play or read your sadness away. Composing composed. “Right yourself by writing yourself,” I’ve exhorted myself for fifty years. It works. It’s working now.

Loneliness is not love’s absence but its excruciating presence.  Love foresees loss, the day when love must end, and that hurts. “The grave’s a fine and private place,” rhymed Andrew Marvell to his coy mistress, “But none, I think, do there embrace.” Only distaste is glad to bid goodbye.

Loneliness produces art. Writing conjures you here. “Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine,” quipped Balzac. “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see only a wisp of smoke,” moaned Van Gogh.

The habit of loneliness is impossible to break – but why would I want to? I refurbish my soul in solitude, making myself better company, more appreciative, less proud. It takes time to recall how lucky we are.

Thoreau introduced me to the worth of loneliness. “I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude,” he wrote. “A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.” What a surprise – the opposite of what my parents taught. Loneliness was a blessing! Such guidance made Thoreau my brother.

I’m not sure I’d relish loneliness as much if I did not write. In a sense, I’m prospecting here, panning the solitude for nuggets of meaning. Silence teaches as the hubbub can’t. A long time ago I wrote a little poem:

 Writing, for me, expresses longing – for our spirits to mate.

I’m sorry my parents were so skittish about feelings. They missed so much life. Duty is drab by comparison: you do as you’re told – and then what?

I have learned more from loneliness than from experience. Silence teaches as the hubbub can’t. “It is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence,” wrote Joseph Conrad. “It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone.”