How to Be Alone (School of Life) (4 page)

Greta Garbo was a famous loner, though in fact she never said ‘I want to be alone’ (the Russian ballerina Grusinskaya, whom Garbo played in
Grand Hotel
(1932), said it). She was a very great actress: the film historian David Denby wrote in 2012 that Garbo introduced a subtlety of expression to the art of silent acting and that its effect on audiences cannot be exaggerated. ‘Worlds turned on her movements.’ She was sufficiently successful to retire at thirty-five after making twenty-eight films. Near the end of her life – and she lived to be eighy-five – she told Sven Broman, her Swedish biographer (with whom she was cooperating), that ‘I was tired of Hollywood. I did not like my work. There were many days when I had to force myself to go to the studio … I really wanted to live another life.’ So she did.

In retirement she adopted a lifestyle of both simplicity and leisure, sometimes just ‘drifting’. But she always had close friends with whom she socialized and travelled. She did not marry but did have serious love affairs with both men and women. She collected art. She walked, alone and with companions, especially in New York. She was a skilful paparazzi-avoider. Since she chose to retire, and for the rest of her life consistently declined opportunities to make further films, it is reasonable to suppose that she was content with that choice.

It is in fact evident that a great many people, for many different reasons, throughout history and across cultures, have sought out solitude to the extent that Garbo did, and after experiencing that lifestyle for a while continue to uphold their choices, even when they have perfectly good opportunities to live more social lives. On average they do not turn into schizoid serial killers, predatory paedophiles or evil monomaniacs. Some of them in fact turn into great artists, creative thinkers and saints – however, not everyone who likes to be alone is a genius, and not all geniuses like to be alone.

Greta Garbo; a famous loner.

2. How We Got Here

I am convinced that we need to explore how we have arrived in this odd situation where we are so frightened of being alone that we aggress, or even apparently hate, those who want to be alone. We refuse, as a society, to extend to them the normal tolerance of difference on which we pride ourselves elsewhere. We stigmatize them. We deny their capacity to identify their own emotions. We fret if we do not have 24/7 social connection with others; we go to bizarre lengths to acquire partners (even though we then get rid of them with increasing frequency). I have already said that I believe that fear is at the root of many people’s deep unease about, or even terror of, being alone. I want to go further now, and argue that the roots of this fear lie in a very deep cultural confusion. For two millennia, at least, we have been trying to live with two radically contrasting and opposed models of what the good life would or should be.

Culturally, there is a slightly slick tendency to blame all our woes, and especially our social difficulties, either on a crude social Darwinism or on an ill-defined package called the ‘Judaeo-Christian paradigm’ or ‘tradition’. Apparently this is why, among other things, we have so much difficulty with sex (both other people’s and our own); why women remain unequal; why we are committed to world domination and ecological destruction; and why we are not as perfectly happy as we deserve. I, for one, do not believe this – but I do believe that we suffer from trying to hold together the values of Judaeo-Christianity (inasmuch as we understand them) and the values of classical civilization, and they really do not fit.

The Roman Empire reached its largest territorial extent under the Emperor Trajan, who reigned from
AD
98–117. At this point it comprised most of what is now Western Europe and some of Eastern Europe and the whole Mediterranean basin. It was a highly efficient state which spread its cultural and technological influence, as well as its military organization, to its conquered territories. One of the reasons for its success was its unusually cohesive culture, which was based in its original republican ethos of patriotism, citizenship and civic responsibility. Even after the Republic collapsed in 27
BC,
when Augustus Caesar became Emperor, these values remained central.

This value system was underpinned by laws which forbade the patricians (the upper classes) to be involved in commerce – this meant that little of their energy could go into ‘business’ or the accumulation of personal wealth through private or entrepreneurial activities. The young male Roman patrician was educated almost entirely for public office, with a curriculum consisting of rhetoric (public speaking), Roman traditions and public affairs. Such a youth grew up believing that the route to personal ‘fulfilment’ lay in public life, structured through the
cursus honorum
(literally ‘the course of offices’), a sequence of elected roles or ‘jobs’, which began with serving as an officer in the army and went on through a variety of legal and ceremonial duties up to provincial governor. Although (a bit like the President of the USA) having a lot of money helped you to get elected, you still had to charm the voters. The successful Roman was therefore a public and social figure: that was the ideal. (The word
honorum
originally meant simply ‘public office’, but you can easily see the connection with the concept of honour. This crossover is still apparent in contemporary Britain in phrases like ‘the New Year’s
honours
list’: where public recognition and status is given to people who are deemed to have performed public services.)

Private morality, interiority and personal ‘fulfilment’ score rather low in such a culture. Honour meant service to the state, the holding of elected public offices. An honourable person – though in Roman society this exclusively applied to men – was judged through his standing in the eyes of other people. His first moral duty was the appropriate ‘performance’ of the self in public – generosity, self-control, being law-abiding and a good public speaker were among the necessary qualities. The judgement of your fellow citizens was the measure of your worth. Even bathing was a social event. You were not privately clean, you had to be seen to be clean by your fellow citizens; perhaps unsurprisingly, nudity seems to have carried unusually little shame or embarrassment in Roman culture.

‘In men of the highest character and noblest genius there is to be found an insatiable desire for honour, command, power and glory,’ wrote Cicero – a man who himself represented and articulated these highest Roman ideals. Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43
BC
) was a statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, consul and constitutionalist. He was also a major intellectual, and introduced Romans to Greek philosophy, which further emphasized the social virtues.

Although we now think of Greek philosophy as highly abstract, disembodied and rarefied, it concluded that human nature was essentially social and communal. Aristotle wrote: ‘It is strange to make the supremely happy man a solitary, since man is a political creature and one whose nature is to live with others.’

The very word ‘civilization’ comes from the Latin word
civis
which meant a citizen, just as the words ‘polite’ and ‘political’ come from
polis,
the Greek word for ‘city’.

But even as this culture reached its greatest height, the Mediterranean world saw the extremely fast rise of a ‘new’ religion, Christianity, which broke out from its Jewish roots and expanded across the Empire. Christianity proposed a set of values almost directly in opposition to the Roman one. They were distinctly unimpressed by Cicero’s ‘insatiable desire for honour, command, power and glory’. In fact they were initially sublimely indifferent to politics altogether, since they believed the world was going to end soon and that what mattered was preparing oneself for the immediate return of the Lord Jesus and an apocalyptic final judgement. Their core values focused around a personal (interior) relationship with God and holiness, humility, obedience and poverty. They had a sense of personal integrity which was very unlike the public morality of the Roman world.

For example, they refused to perform the required traditional sacrifice. Actually many Romans did not have any personal belief in their national divinities, but they saw the performance of religious rituals as part of their public duty to the State. What concerned them was good public order. The problem with the Christians was persistent civil disobedience and a deep-rooted culture clash. It is hard to imagine two sets of values – the silent, unworldly (even anti-worldly) Christians and the social, public and political virtues of the Roman world – more radically different. The meteoric success of this innovative cult must have felt extremely threatening to traditional Romans.

Before these tensions could work themselves through and find accommodation with each other, the situation changed totally. In
AD
410 the city of Rome fell to Alaric’s Visigoth army. The sacking and looting of Rome was a terrible shock to the whole Mediterranean world. There was a deep sense that something had changed forever. Historians still tend to treat 410 as the end of the Classical era and beginning of the Middle Ages.

With the collapse and breakup of the Empire an odd and confusing thing happened. In a highly turbulent and unsettled Europe, broken up into small fragmentary kingdoms and dealing with the constant inflow of new groups of territorially aggressive cultures from the northeast, the Church and particularly the monks – the heirs to the solitary traditions of the desert – became one of the principal forces of social cohesion, continuity and culture. It would be fair to say that of the two competing ideologies of the late Roman period (the public vs the private; the social vs the solitary) the Christian model won, but only by giving up its core values – accepting the ‘world’, embracing politics, power and even militarism. Western Europe moved into the early modern period with a profound confusion between the values of the social and the solitary; and an unacknowledged but profound belief that people on the ‘opposite side’ were threatening civilization itself and were therefore very frightening.

The situation was inherently unstable. For the last thousand years, social history has seen a continual seesaw between these two sets of values – and therefore a constant worry and restlessness about how to balance the social communal good against solitary interior freedom.

Until the fourteenth century, solitude was highly valued. The great ‘media celebrities’ of the period were the saints – and a remarkable number of them were solitary: ascetic monks or hermits; people going into self-imposed exile and rejecting the civilized world; women choosing not to participate in marriage, their only socially conventional lifestyle choice. The greatest virtue was to ‘save your own soul’ and develop an intimate relationship with the transcendent. Those with more political ambitions (usually kings and would-be kings) could buy themselves out by endowing monasteries and building churches – so that their souls could be prayed for by someone else.

In the fourteenth century the Renaissance, and in the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation, challenged this dominant paradigm in rather different ways. But the eighteenth century saw a seismic shift. The Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) quite consciously generated a radical shift back towards a more Roman understanding of human society.

The Enlightenment deliberately sought to reestablish the ethics and moral paradigm of the Classical era. This was reflected in many more ways than purely intellectual ones: an aesthetic style evolved which was happily called neoclassicism and affected literature (especially poetry), fashion (men started to wear plain dark clothes and spotless linen neckcloths to demonstrate how chaste and clean they were; women wore simpler, plainer frocks in fragile cottons and fine silks) and particularly architecture, gardening and ‘town planning’.

Edinburgh, which self-consciously referred to itself as ‘the Athens of the North’, built the New Town quite deliberately and knowingly to reflect this understanding of the city as a model of civilization, using classical architecture to represent their rational, civilized, democratic and free society.

Inevitably these changes also affected private morality. The citizen was to be judged by social deportment rather than inner holiness. In
Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen has her heroine, Catherine Morland, weigh the correctness of her actions after a quarrel with her closest friends against such Enlightenment standards: