I shared a house with a woman. Two woman, in fact, but here I’ll discuss only the one. She smiled a lot and was always up for going out. It was rare that I’d find her at home over the weekend, there was always a polo match, or a picnic or a wine festival to go to.
Her bedroom was next to mine. She had a radio in her room with a built-in alarm clock. The radio came on at 06:30 each morning and wouldn’t be switched off until she went to bed. Even then, she’d use the sleep function to have the radio lull her to sleep after which it turned off by itself, ready to come on again the following morning.
I came home one evening, after work. This was one of the rare occasions she hadn’t gone out. From the outside all the lights in the house were on, which isn’t unusual. At the time I was living in Johannesburg, not the safest city in the world in the mid early 2000’s. When I walked inside the house the TV was on, her radio was turned up loud and pulsing music from her room and the house was filled with noise. She was in the kitchen making dinner. When she saw me she smiled and stopped what she was doing. She ran into her room, turned the radio down and muted the TV and proceeded to talk to me as she ate her dinner and I prepared my own.
That night I asked her about the radio and the TV and the constant noise. She told me that she didn’t like silence, or being alone, that she liked being with people and having something on in the background at all times. I asked her what she was avoiding. She told me she didn’t like to think about things.
The challenge of solitude
I’ve quoted Thomas Merton before and he’s worth quoting again. He said on solitude:
It’s not ‘something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the centre of your soul.’
Thomas Merton
Solitude, or the idea of being alone can be frightening. I think Merton is right, we all carry a void inside ourselves, and without distraction, noise, people, the void grows deeper and we fear that we might have to look at what is there. For most of us, it is the reality that we are alive and that we will die and that there are parts of us that are only for us, unsharable, untouchable. Burdens of our existence that we have no choice but to carry by ourselves.
I’m not sure how to describe the burden. It comes with being conscious of our own existence as individuals, and that despite being with others, with people who love us, there is a part of us that we can’t share because we are who we are, and other people are who they are. And despite love, empathy and understanding, there will always be a gulf between our existence and every other person’s existence. You can’t be me, and I can’t be you.
Filling the abyss isn’t possible
We try to fill the abyss. We collect experiences, hangovers, we entertain ourselves, use whatever we have to stuff that hole, level it out so that we can walk across it and get on with our lives. But it will never be filled. At best we can look away or cover it up.
And we know when we’re close to falling in. When we don’t have anything to distract us, we feel the discomfort of boredom. This is the subconscious trigger that pushes us to find something to do, to keep us occupied. And if we persist and still do nothing then we think and find ourselves in that abyss. For some this is hell, a loneliness that hollows one out and leaves you empty.
My grandfather
My grandfather never had a problem with silence, or spending a long period of time by himself. It gave him an air of wisdom, strength. He grew up on a farm, was the type of man who smiled rarely and spoke infrequently. He could stand and look over his land, leaning on a walking stick and just be there for a long time, nothing but the sound of a breeze twisting through the branches of gnarled trees.
I don’t know if he’d grown to accept the abyss, the reality of our loneliness, or if he stood there daydreaming about winning the lottery. Maybe he stood there and didn’t think, just white noise.
I never asked.
For myself, I can spend time by myself, in silence. I don’t do it often. I usually listen to audiobooks, or read or do something. When I’m not listening, reading or watching something, and I’m truly alone, I daydream or relive experiences in my mind.
Sometimes, however, I do stare into the abyss of my solitude, and the loneliness can be crushing. I still hope, one day, that I can share all of what it is to be me with someone, and that I might experience what it is to be them, and thereby bring some light to both our abysses.