Robert Rowland Smith on Feeling Lonely

To say that feeling lonely is different from being alone has become a commonplace: some people prefer their own company and that is that. So too the notion that one can be lonely in a crowd: you spend your days surrounded by others but somehow still feel unwarmed. Less understood is what loneliness actually is.

The great French critic, Maurice Blanchot, wrote about ‘essential solitude’, and it’s worth stating that there’s a loneliness proper to all of us, regardless of how extrovert we might be. Being human involves things that cannot involve others, things like going to the dentist, taking exams, and having a medical. Nobody can take your place. And if those things sound relatively ordinary, the same logic applies to life and death. No one can be born on your behalf, and no one can die. No matter how full our lives might be, there’s an essential solitude that belongs inalienably to all of us, a connection to our fate that can’t be taken away. When it comes to certain fundamental aspects of being, we are all alone.
 
Is such essential solitude the same as loneliness? Not quite. Part of the comfort in having a partner lies in the fact that, although each of you will separately die your own death, you share life together until death do you part. The partnership makes your mortality bearable; your essential solitude never has to manifest itself as loneliness.
 
But what if you are alone and lonely, with nobody around to comfort you? Loneliness might be a form of self-pity, but it’s mainly a yearning for others. And yet it’s not about wanting to possess other people, as in romantic or erotic love. Loneliness starts with an unrequited desire to share life with another person, if only for an evening. It’s not about claiming someone else; if anything, it’s about being claimed, about not being left in lost property.
 
Because of this, loneliness engenders in us a respect for other people. It might make us feel sad, but it shares a root with compassion. Our sense of our own suffering, when lonely, makes us more attuned to the beauty and goodness of other people, and to how they too are doing what they can with their fate.
 
Robert Rowland Smith is the author of Breakfast with Socrates: the Philosophy of Everyday Life (Profile Books).

 

Comments

[Jenna Schrock]

I admit that going to the dentist's office for a regular checkup is scary. Why? The dentist might announce that I have a cavity or a root canal is necessary. That's why I always ask my Mom to accompany me during dental visits. However, I felt so brave one time when Mom couldn't accompany me and I needed to be alone in visiting the dentist. Gladly, the visit went well. Our dentist in Los Angeles just told me about Invisalign treatment.