The solitary life in Daydreaming on the Porch

“We must reserve a little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, wherein to establish our true liberty and principal retreat and solitude.”

Montaigne

“No one will ever uphold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at last checker his life with solitude.”

De Quincey

“Provided that they have friends and acquaintances, those who are passionately engaged in pursuing interests which are important to them may achieve happiness without having any very close relationships.”

Anthony Storr, in “Solitude: A Return to Self” published in 1988

A friend of mine many years age once remarked that I was not a “loner” but rather a “very private person.” I’ve thought about that a lot in the intervening years and realize more and more the truth of what he said. I think we all cherish our privacy, but I’ve gone further I believe in cultivating even stricter privacy about much of my interior life, from both a lack of desire and unwillingness to share my innermost self, except by degree and in small parcels, with others. I think I’ve always been like this because I’ve only had a very few close friends to share things with, and in taking that risk of becoming so close to a few, I have also been badly hurt, more by myself than from those others, although they were the people through whom the damage and hurt flowed.

From an early age I have pretty much done things on my own. I played football and basketball in the neighborhood with other kids after school, but I didn’t form any close bonds. There were no kindred spirits, with the exception of one girl I knew well in high school, but that did not turn out well, and, I, for one wasn’t at all surprised. Rather than hang out with friends in junior high and high school, I retreated into my lawn mowing business and stamp collecting, which was quite a passion for me then, my one great hobby before I got much more passionately interested in and consumed by photography. That passion has continued unabated to this very day, from my newspaper assignments and enterprise photography 20, 30 and 40 years ago through the countless rolls of film I took, pre-digital camera days, during half a dozen solitary road trips across the country. In addition to the photographs there were long travel journal entries. In those days there was not Easy Diary or Prosebox to upload those entries to.

But now as always, when I went somewhere special, such as to the beach for long walks, to the gardens and nature preserves near Charleston or in so many special places around the country over the past 40 years, I have almost always, with a handful of exceptions literally, been in the company of myself. At age 63 I now seem to know nothing else. It’s so rare to ever be out exploring a backroad with another person or a group (as I did a lot in the1970s) that I am utterly at one with myself and at peace with this. There isn’t any other way to experience all those places, so I do it by myself. I am often the only solitary person at these gardens and preserves, but I don’t care anymore. I don’t get depressed about it as I sometimes did in the past. This is me: a person who not only cherishes solitude but knows little else, outwardly and in my interior life.

Ultimately I realize we are all alone, even in the midst of family and children and even in large crowds (which I assiduously avoid). It’s like that saying, “the loneliness of crowds.” But most people are surrounded by other people, a majority of the time, even if it’s a situation of a couple who have been together for 40 or 50 years. Often you hear that one spouse does not live long after a long-term partner has passed on. Or, divorced people are so desperate to remarry because they can’t abide the though of being alone or living by themselves.

I never faced that problem because for all of my working life until I became a live-in caregiver for my mother in 2011, I have lived alone. I now have our dear old cat, Ginger, and my mother to take care of. I’m alone here in this big house now only in the deepest sense. It’s me and my countless books, photographs framed and hung on the walls upstairs, matted and in boxes, and my occasional writing. There’s very little correspondence by email or internet chat or messaging with anyone these days. It’s almost non-existent. I miss that and yet in a sense I have gone full circle to where I was in pre-Internet days. Alone with my books, thoughts, walks, and my own brand of meditation and ongoing efforts to live mindfully in the precious moments of the present. I am still a pilgrim and a seeker of knowledge and enlightenment. That long and winding road always beckons me on.

I found the photo below some time ago and present it as a perfect encapsulation and representation of my life as I live it now and as I envision being and doing in the future when I am older. I picture this man as me. We are about the same age. He is in England, I believe, walking beside a beautiful stream in the highlands. I am in South Carolina in the U.S. I wish I could know him.