“Language . . . has created the word ‘loneliness’ to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word ‘solitude’ to express the glory of being alone.” – Paul Tillich
Our kids are grown, and my wife was out of town for the past week. You do the math. The house sure was empty. I read a lot and for some diagnosable reason made the bed each morning and carried on with life’s responsibilities, but since television isn’t my thing and I rarely listen to music, other than the weird times when I carried on a conversation with myself, it sure was quiet around the house. As they say, too quiet.
I think everyone would agree that loneliness is a terrible thing, but as Tillich noted, the English language makes room for an optimistic approach to time alone and calls it solitude.
Wendell Berry described solitude as the place where “we lose loneliness,” which is just a delightful thought. He claims it a space where your “inner voices become audible” (tell me about it) and you sense “the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.” It is a time and place where you reconnect with the inner you.
I don’t always like the inner me, but he deserves notice from time to time, and given the noisiness of this party called life it takes a little work to find the space. Or your kids grow up and your wife takes a business trip.
When my dad died in 1994, I worried that my mom would be lost every day. Turned out I was wrong. When I spoke with her about it, she said, “I’ll be sad from time to time, but I’m not going to let myself be sad all the time.” And for the eighteen years she had left on this planet, she was right.
Berry concluded that one emerges from solitude more useful to others: “The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.”¹
In solitude, I reflected on solitude and concluded that it deserves incorporation into the rhythm of life. But I’m sure happy to have my wife home again.
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¹ Wendell Berry, “What Are People For?: Essays” 11 (Counterpoint, 1990).
I want to see everything there is to see.
We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
My wife and I attended the opening night of Twelve Angry Americans at Malibu High School last Thursday.
My new office is in the heart of Seaver College on the Pepperdine University campus, and after close to a decade in a law school setting it is interesting to be around undergraduate students on a daily basis.
Our 2008 move from Mississippi to Malibu sounds like a seismic culture shift, but moving from affluent, artsy, coastal Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to affluent, artsy, coastal Malibu was not as mind-blowing as you’d think. Okay, it was mind-blowing, just not as mind-blowing as you’d think.
Prince died one year ago today. His death was a terrible blow to the music world, and it was also a terrible blow to my wife, who is the biggest Prince fan that I know. I never doubted that she loved me more than Prince, but then again, the three of us never were in the same room.
It was just a truck.
Today is my wife’s birthday, and the specific number is none of your business (or, apparently, mine!). Jody’s parents both worked as tax preparers back in 19-whenever when she made her grand entrance on April 14—talk about demanding attention from the very start! She deserves a lot of attention. Jody is, hands down, the most impressive person that I know.
Starting to Look Up 