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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alone:TwoTypesofSolitude And what do children do when they are left alone? They take up shells and ashes, and they build something! —Epictetus Solitude: a false councilor who nurses at both breasts the twin infants Egotism and Vanity. —Maxime du Camp M y wife’s departure was sudden but not, in retrospect, unplanned or without warning. Her father died, and she had recently turned fifty. Later, friends would describe these as reasons and even portents. That I was away didn’t help. While she tended her dying father in a Las Vegas nursing home, I was drafting a novel at a writer’s colony. When not writing or swimming in a lake across the street, I careened my Honda Civic along leafy winding Berkshire roads, blasting the same three Beatles songs over and over again on my CD player. The songs were “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday,” and “Help.” Now I’m on my own, alone. Alone. Note how the word breaks between syllables into article and noun: a, as in one, or a single case out of the multitude; lone as in loner. When all else fails turn to etymology. Alone: c.1300, contraction of Old English all ana “all by oneself,” from all “all, wholly” + an “one.” Similar compounds found in German (allein) and Dutch (alleen ). Definition: by ones self, apart from or exclusive of; single; solo; solitary; applied to a person or thing. The word “alone” itself rings hollow, a two-syllable word where the two syllables deplete rather than fulfill or complement each other. Alone 173 See: lone, lonely, single, solitary, solo, alien. Only. Exclusively. I. Am. A. Lone. Alone: “In bad company” (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary). I write this on the shore of another lake, Lake Sinclair, “the cleanest lake in Georgia.” I’ve come here to fulfill a one-year visiting writer appointment at the college in Milledgeville. But I’ve also come here to be alone. I’ve rented a house right on the lake, a modest A-frame with an L-shaped loft where I work and sleep, and where my desk faces a wall of triangular windows that look directly out past some pine trees at the water. Though I’ve been here less than a week, already I have my routines . I swim twice a day, across the inlet and back, three hundred strokes, at dawn and dusk. Mornings, into the sunrise; evenings, into the sunset. Afternoons, when the sun is too hot, I go out on the dock and just look at the lake. There are neighbors here, or anyway there are other houses. But so far except for a passing water-skier I have yet to meet or even see another human soul, and I’m glad about that. I don’t want company here. The lake is enough company. After thirty-two years in New York City, I’ve had enough society to last me the rest of my life. Though the lake is dotted mostly with weekend cottages, through my window I see only trees and water. The distant shore is lined with pine trees, the homes there hidden. It could be a lake in Wisconsin, or in the Klondike. A geography of solitude: that’s what I see from my desk. I’ve seen many such geographies in my time: the craggy islands of the Aegean, the frozen fiords of Norway, the sun-starved villages north of the Arctic Circle . . . But this one belongs to me; it’s mine. Unlike the solitude that swept over and nearly drowned me back in New York after my wife left me, that forced solitude that took up with me like an unwanted lover, this one I have chosen for myself. Here, at last, my solitude and I are happily wed. Centuries divide my solitude from that of the first historical (Christian ) solitary, Paul of Egypt (3rd century b.c.), who, at age sixteen, to escape the Decian persecution, fled to the Egyptian desert at Thebaid to spend the rest of his 113 years in a cave. The man to be known as Saint Paul was but the first in a phalanx of ascetics who fled the chaos and persecutions of the Roman Empire to dwell in the deserts 174 Alone of Egypt. These Desert Fathers were the forerunners of all monks and hermits (from the Greek eremos, meaning “desert” or “uninhabited ,” hence eremitic or “desert-dwelling”). The desert drew them not only for the protection it afforded...

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