Going solo

Greta Garbo can prob­ably explain it much more suc­cinctly than I can:

“I never said, ‘I want to be alone.’ I only said, ‘I want to be left alone.’ There is all the difference.”

It is an import­ant dif­fer­ence too. There always seems to be so much con­fu­sion over being alone and want­ing solitude — yet I really can’t see where the dif­fi­culties arise. We’ve all heard loneli­ness described with fright­en­ing phrases like “the unspoken curse of mod­ern soci­ety”. Because human beings are nat­ur­ally social anim­als, it often seems that we would prefer to admit to mur­der­ing our next door neigh­bours and remorse­lessly kick­ing their cat, rather than con­fess that we might be lonely. Fair enough, I sup­pose (although, on a couple of occa­sions, I’ve found that such a con­fes­sion has been good for the soul). But solitude is com­pletely dif­fer­ent — it’s some­thing that one act­ively seeks out.

So, by now, you’re prob­ably sit­ting there wait­ing for some sort of admis­sion, aren’t you? OK. Yes, there are times when I feel lonely. Hell, I’m only human. Happy now? Cru­cially, how­ever, there are also just as many times when I really do desire com­plete solitude — and I find that these epis­odes are increas­ing. Dur­ing the year that this web­log has been in exist­ence, there have been a num­ber of occa­sions — some of which are obvi­ous from what I’ve writ­ten at the time — where I have sealed myself off from people, activ­it­ies and things for days. And it’s been heav­enly. I could spout some hippy clap-trap about need­ing time to “get back in touch with myself”, but rather it’s just rel­ish­ing the chance to waste hours and days relax­ing, read­ing, listen­ing to music, going for walks and think­ing. Strangely enough, as regards the lat­ter, all those empty hours gen­er­ally lead to less think­ing than I nor­mally engage in when I’m caught up in the pace of daily life — I know what Graybo means, because I’m also guilty of think­ing far too much.

All this ram­bling non­sense (oh, you noticed) was promp­ted by the dis­cov­ery of Club Recluse, a group that under­stands our occa­sional desire to be left alone. Maybe this is the only way we can con­vince those bay­ing hordes of people demand­ing that we par­take in society’s social whirl, that all we really want is our own com­pan­ion­ship for a while. The some­what ironic sug­ges­tion behind this site is that, to be a recluse, we should join a club — although it’s a club unlike any other:

“By join­ing Club Recluse you become a mem­ber of a unique assort­ment of people, all of whom hate clubs. You never meet the other mem­bers. In fact, once you receive our mem­ber­ship kit you never hear from us again. You just spend qual­ity time alone. You get to know the per­son you should know best — YOU!”

Oh, and just for your inform­a­tion, since I know how one can so eas­ily read between the lines of what I write here — no, I’m not feel­ing par­tic­u­larly reclus­ive at the moment. Or lonely. Phew, etc. Just so we don’t mis­un­der­stand each other.