There is a kind of being together that feels as simple and open as being alone, where your experience is not stifled or obscured by the presence of another but deepened and magnified. Such friendship is rare and very precious. All other companies, no matter how likable, inevitably reach a point of saturation and begin to drown. If a person is an introvert, that point comes quickly and violently. The return to solitude is the rapture.
Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) spreads this happy relief with great interest and poetic passion in an excerpt from Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library) – his 1935 collection of reflections, and a century earlier, the wonderful poet Ross Gay. The Book of Joys.
Despite publishing twenty-two books in twenty years, as well as many essays, poems, and newspaper columns – an art that can only be possible in deep and uninterrupted solitude, haunted by Susan Sontag's lament that “one can never be alone enough to write” – Macaulay was not a hermit. He gave speeches, attended events, threw parties, and appeared regularly on public radio to offer deep views on the state of the world. During World War II, she worked as a nurse and civil servant. During WWII, like Marie Curie before the war, she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of sixty. He regularly writes to the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary – his favorite book – with suggestions, corrections, and improvements. (“To amend such a great work makes me happy,” he wrote in one of these stories about a small but deep joy in life.) When his apartment was demolished in the Blitz, all his books were destroyed, it was the volumes of the dictionary that he mourned the most. When he rebuilt his home, he continued to host friends at salons and soirees.
But despite his high sociability, Macaulay embodies the true test of an introvert – not whether a person engages in social activities, but whether he is charged or consumed by them. In the story titled “The Departure of the Visitors,” he is reveled in the joy of finally being alone:
A great peace is found: sleepy, golden silence, flowing honey-sweetness over my house, soaking, dripping like music on the wall, swirling on the ground like trampled herbs. Peace of the gods; the emptiness of God.
[…]
An easy chair extends wide arms to welcome; sofa expandable, no guest; these books are shining, brown and gold, blue and blue on their shelves; they may spread on the floor, the chairs, the sofa, and lie down ready to hand… The echo of stupid words lingers in the air, is struck, dies and is forgotten, the wind closes behind them. The heavy volume is lifted from its shelf to the sofa. There is a silence like falling flowers over a wiped out kingdom where the hypocrites have left.
What should you do with all this blissful silence? It is a gift, a miracle, a jewel of gold, a piece of some benevolent heavenly order, which has fallen to earth like a wonderful lost star. A person's life is for him as well. Dear visitors, what a great thing you have given, not only in going out, but also in coming, so that we can learn to appreciate your absence, and hold ourselves to the rest of your absence.
Ironically, even Macaulay's museum was a tourist from which he ended up needing a break. In another essay, he gives a surprisingly similar internal response to finishing a book – that moment when, when, when he puts the last word on the last page, the mind becomes uncluttered again. You write:
Entertainment spread before my glowing eyes, a halcyon sea, soon to be overwhelmed by the flotsam and jetsam of long-neglected purposes, which I know, will soon reappear when I enter that treacherous, alluring sea. Rest is now a short business, and the return of the past is the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and uncoordinated, between one job and the next. There are always debts, things that have not been settled, things that will undoubtedly never be done, I put mocking, insulting heads, so that even if I am lazy, I will fish among the sad souls who want to kill them. But now, as I have just come out of the tangled and toilsome tree that has so long ensnared me, I will think of the sweet and irresistible fishing, the pleasures and the freedom like the lotus-eaters or the gods.
Couples with May Sarton's wonderful ode to the art of solitude from the era of Macaulay Personal Pleasuresthen revisit Olivia Laing's The Modern Art of Solitude in a Crowd and Stephen Batchelor's Field Guide to Exciting Solitude.
