Exercises in Loneliness. Unfinished Essays. Julie Delvaux
costs.
Meanwhile I am not sure about self-sufficiency that arises from solitary living, as it follows from Schopenhauer’s work. Perhaps, the reason for this is that there is not much true self-sufficiency around. My uncertainty is also due to the fact that every person needs a conversation with real people to arrive at unbiased conclusions. Writers need this all the more so. We need real people from past and present, with their jokes, hopes and weaknesses. There is no place for arrogance in literature as far as the knowledge of life is concerned. Every hyperbole conceals something very realistic, which usually presents itself in the society, that huge common room where women used to write in secret until Virginia Woolf announced that we needed money and a room of our own. As a woman, I entirely agree with her. However, since then many writers, both men and women, have acquired money and shut themselves in their own rooms, causing the style and subjects of their works to suffer dramatically. This is why I am not sure about Schopenhauer’s aloofness, as it leads some folk to think they can get by with their intuition and the little knowledge of life they’ve got. Indeed, we can imagine many things by going through the Panoptikum of our brain, but for that you need some examples of what things can be. Reading will not suffice, and in fact, a thoughtful, attentive reading is no less a lonely experience than writing.
The essays therefore are meant to give us food for thought, and what can be better food than the one that comes from a person who has been alone for the better part of their life? Being the only child does not necessarily predispose you to solitude or the perpetual feeling of loneliness, but as you live on and discover people, habits and modi operandi, you realize that solitude is salubrious, and loneliness is not the end of the world. In the end, as Joseph Brodsky put it in The Great Elegy for John Donne, if there are people and things that share our lives, what then shares our death and after-life? Is this not an indication that we are always – infinitely – alone? Is this not also a hint at the divine nature of a man because if the man is created after God’s own image, he has to be alone and to learn to live with his solitude and loneliness, as this is what God has been doing since the time before Time? This is not to say, «stop moaning! loneliness isn’t the worst thing that can happen». Depending on circumstances and your predisposition, it can be the worst thing. But perhaps something in these essays will provide consolation, and each one being unfinished is a key to this. Loneliness, solitude, uniqueness are essentially permanent states; but, like tides, they can subside. All we need to do is to learn to live by the sea.
1
I remember speaking to one film director who complained that he had to write an article about his film. In his words, he’d be happy to talk about it as much as he could, but writing was weighing him down. As the person who, instead of a silver spoon, was probably born with a pen, I obviously asked what it was that he didn’t like about writing. His answer was that writing was «a lonely experience».
Of course, as I’m writing this at an ungodly hour I have to admit that, physically, writing is the lonely experience. But mentally it can be quite stimulating and even scandalous, if one considers the works of Marquis de Sade, some of which he wrote in prison, and some – in a lunatic asylum.
Back in 2006 being alone felt exhilarating. I craved independence, and I had got my hands full. Not that I didn’t want to share work or success, but I was determined to succeed alone, first and foremost. Unconsciously, perhaps, I was drawing inspiration from the famous New York, New York song, paraphrasing it as «if I can make it on my own, I can make it with someone else».
As I was to find out, we can all do things on our own but they often take awfully more time than if we did them in a company of like-minded people. Having gradually revisited my attitude to loneliness, I nonetheless kept my opinion of writing. It is not a lonely experience, for when I write I imagine the whole world that I inhabit both as an actor and a creator. My company is my characters, and even when I compose an academic essay or an article about a community leisure centre I am still surrounded by facts, figures and personalities. This is a thrilling experience, although I realise it may be more interesting, complex and fulfilling to operate a set of living people than the world that only exists in your head and maybe used to exist for real a good few centuries ago.
The longer you are alone, however, and the more you cherish your solitary state, the more you become insensitive to the outer world. Such scenario is not inevitable but loneliness becomes a habit, it blinds you, and it might take a bigger or lesser catastrophe to shake you out of this routine. You turn into Tony Camonte from Scarface, obsessed with power your solitude grants you and fully oblivious to the woes of others.
2
A few pearls of wisdom from the Memoirs by Casanova:
«My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it. It is only necessary to have courage, for strength without self-confidence is useless.»
«As for the deceit perpetrated upon women, let it pass, for, when love is in the way, men and women as a general rule dupe each other.»
(Casanova knew this better than anyone: his affair with La Charpillon (Marie Anne Auspurgher) was a fascinating, if impossibly bitter, case of deceit perpetrated by a woman upon a man. The «affair» which was never consummated and which cost Casanova 2,000 guineas culminated in a «journée du dupe», when Casanova was denied access to La Charpillon under the pretext that she was dying. Inconsolable, he decided to throw himself in the Thames but was talked out of it by a friend who happened to pass by. Together, they went to the Ranelagh Gardens where Casanova saw his expensive darling dancing, offensively healthy and beautiful.)
Also, to carry on expanding on the phrase by Huysmans:
«There is only one reason for literature to exist, to save those who write it from the tedium of living»,
here are a couple of extracts from Casanova’s Memoirs that quite potently prove the Frenchman’s point:
«I have written the story of my life,.. but am I wise in throwing it before a public of which I know nothing but evil? No, I am aware it is sheer folly, but I want to be busy, I want to laugh, and why should I deny myself this gratification?… By recollecting the pleasures I have had formerly, I renew them, I enjoy them the second time, while I laugh at the remembrance of times now past, and which I no longer feel».
Indeed, for the man who had been to many countries and places and had known (literally, as figuratively, speaking) many people, to find himself as a librarian in an old chateau in Dux must have been frustrating, especially as his health also began to deteriorate. With nothing interesting happening around him in the chateau his only resort was his own past, which thought he captured with the well-known «my life is my subject, and my subject is my life».
[The quotes are from the unabridged English translation of Casanova’s Memoirs (London, 1894)].
When we state that we are happy being lonely we dupe ourselves. I have just stated that loneliness can become a habit, and you can object to acquiring it, like Casanova. But I sincerely doubt that any person would genuinely wish to remain alone forever. Robinson Crusoe found himself a Friday, and we inevitably ascribe anthropomorphic traits to our otherwise solitary world. Whether we cherish books or pets, we turn them into something we would not want to lose, an undeniably human extension of ourselves.
The reader would certainly want to know how it happened that I started thinking and writing about loneliness. I went through a stage of wanting to be alone in my early teens, which may be familiar to many. Some early poems on this subject included the one with rather telling lines:
I love solitude,
I pray