Not Waving but Drowning

“Please hold through the silence.”

—Business telephone message

Last night, while writing a long e-mail letter to a dear friend, I realized by the third paragraph that I hadn’t quite found my voice. I seemed to be at some distance from myself as I was writing. It was a strange sensation. I normally compose quickly and with ease. Last night my words had sound but not voice.

This morning I remembered a Conrad Aiken short story I greatly admired when I first discovered it as a young man in my early thirties. I even read it aloud to my writing classes for many years. “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” is the story of a boy retreating from the world and disappearing into his own mind. I hadn’t thought about the story in many years. This morning it seemed to hang in the air above my bed.

Some half dozen years ago, during a dinner party at the home of old friends—we had been gathering four times a year for more than twenty years—a thought passed through my mind: I don’t care any longer whether I’m entertaining; I don’t care to tell funny stories any more or try to be charming. Such a thought had never before occurred to me. The truth is, it wasn’t a thought so much as a message passing through my head; I was merely its passive observer. I wasn’t watching it; it was watching me. Since that evening the message has visited me many times.

Before that evening such a thought would have been entirely out of character for me. From the time I entered graduate school at twenty-six till that evening at the dinner party, I had sought out friends who read and reflected and told stories and engaged in witty conversation. I thought of conversation as a gaily colored beach ball to be kept aloft with light taps, quick kicks, and sideways punches so that it was always dancing in sunlight beside a large body of blue water. The air must not go out of it, and it was never to touch the ground. And I always tried to do my part— often more than my part—to keep the ball aloft with wit, stories, jokes, reflections, confessions. Sometimes I failed, and sometimes I was outclassed, but I always tried. And then one evening I didn’t care any more.

This morning, with the Conrad Aiken story almost palpably in the air above my bed, I remembered that night at the dinner party, and then I thought of my voiceless letter last night, and I wondered what was happening, and why.

I remembered a period in my life that began when I was sixteen—we changed neighborhoods, and I lost the friends of my childhood and failed to make close friends with those who lived near me. I had some high-school friends, but they lived at some distance, and we never developed the closeness I longed for. Then, when I was eighteen, I lost even the high-school friends when I went to work in a printing plant. I developed friendships of a sort with a few of those men, but nothing close. I also developed friendships with some guys that hung around a pizza parlor and, after we hit twenty-one, a bar called Tammy’s. But we weren’t really friends so much as we were proximates, people whose bodies shared the same space and time, but whose souls did not. For ten years—from the time I was sixteen till I was twenty-six—I spent my free time merely coasting among proximates. They were the loneliest years of my life.

From eighteen to twenty-six I commuted to college as a part-time student, so I made almost no friends there either. It was only when I turned twenty-six and entered graduate school full-time that I walked into the party that life was meant to be, and I tried to keep it going for the rest of my life. In graduate school I discovered for the...