The lemonade of loneliness
Dec. 22nd, 2009 01:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersOne thing I had intended to write about in a longer piece about how it's better to be lonely than to be humbled by love is how I experience loneliness. I'm losing part of the context here, because the consideration of loneliness was going to follow a description of my relationship history, part of the point of which was to establish that I've been single a lot more of my life than I've been in a relationship. Being single is the default condition for me, and because of that I've experienced a lot of loneliness in all its varieties.
There's a line in John Kessel's Good News from Outer Space that has always stuck with me, though I've never looked it up again in the couple of decades since I read the book, so who knows how much the line has been rewritten in my head. It was something to the effect that loneliness is the inability to say the things that are most important to you. Loneliness is a kind of muteness, which I always thought explained very well that sense of being lonely in a crowd. It's not about absence of people, in other words, it's about an absence of someone who wants to hear your story.
Well, here I am telling my story. Which is to say that I think loneliness has been perhaps the driving force in my interest in writing. It may also explain why I ended up gravitating to fanzines and online fora, where my writing could get a more immediate, personal response. Beyond that, however, it's also true that in a lot of ways I prefer writing to other forms of communication. I prefer e-mail to the telephone, for example. I like the distance -- perhaps even the aloofness -- allowed by writing. So it isn't just that I'm driven by loneliness to write, but that I cultivate the loneliness. At which point it becomes less a loneliness -- a lack, a wanting -- and more a solitude -- something desired. I've always enjoyed my solitude and communing with myself. Maybe too much so, I don't know. It's certainly part of the equation of why I've spent more of my life single than in a relationship.
There's a line in John Kessel's Good News from Outer Space that has always stuck with me, though I've never looked it up again in the couple of decades since I read the book, so who knows how much the line has been rewritten in my head. It was something to the effect that loneliness is the inability to say the things that are most important to you. Loneliness is a kind of muteness, which I always thought explained very well that sense of being lonely in a crowd. It's not about absence of people, in other words, it's about an absence of someone who wants to hear your story.
Well, here I am telling my story. Which is to say that I think loneliness has been perhaps the driving force in my interest in writing. It may also explain why I ended up gravitating to fanzines and online fora, where my writing could get a more immediate, personal response. Beyond that, however, it's also true that in a lot of ways I prefer writing to other forms of communication. I prefer e-mail to the telephone, for example. I like the distance -- perhaps even the aloofness -- allowed by writing. So it isn't just that I'm driven by loneliness to write, but that I cultivate the loneliness. At which point it becomes less a loneliness -- a lack, a wanting -- and more a solitude -- something desired. I've always enjoyed my solitude and communing with myself. Maybe too much so, I don't know. It's certainly part of the equation of why I've spent more of my life single than in a relationship.
