On Solitude Without Misanthropy
Wanting to be alone and liking people are not opposites. An essay leaning on a little Taoism.
People assume that wanting to be alone means you are tired of people, and it can, but usually it does not. The two things live in different rooms.
I like people. I like the noise of a good table, the way a story gets better as it goes around, the particular warmth of a bar where the bartender remembers what you drink. Hospitality is one of the few things I take seriously without irony. And I still need, regularly and without guilt, to be completely alone.
Misanthropy is a posture. It requires an audience to perform its disappointment for. Real solitude wants no audience at all. It is not a rejection of anyone. It is a return to a baseline, the quiet from which everything else is easier to hear.
There is a Taoist instinct in this that I keep coming back to. The valley is useful because it is empty. The cup holds water because of the space inside it. A person needs the same interior room, kept clear, not filled with obligations and opinions and other people’s urgency. You do not become a hermit. You keep a hollow place, and you protect it.
The strange result is that the solitude makes me better company. I come back from it with something to bring rather than something to take. The friend who has spent real time alone is easier to be around than the one who is quietly terrified of the silence and needs you to fill it.
So I guard the empty hours the way I guard the full ones. Not because I prefer the emptiness. Because without it, the fullness stops being a pleasure and starts being a noise.