+ + + | p a y i n g a n o b l i g a t i o n | By choice or by necessity, permanently or intermittently, you're going to spend some time alone.
+ + + Obligations fill the rooms of my house. The French Provencal furniture was a wedding gift to my parents from my father's youngest brother. The china clock with the gold trim was my grandmother's; it was made in Ansonia, New York, in 1896. My mother's father painted the landscape that hangs in the living room. There is a cheap glass dish in the closet over the stove; it has never, in my memory, been anywhere else. There is nothing remarkable or particularly beautiful about the china clock, the painting, or the furniture. But they do represent the permanence of choices that are separate from the stories I could tell you about these things. When I'm alone, the things in these rooms become empty of associations. The charm of the clock, the aspiration to the furniture, the waxy texture of the oil painting, and the abstraction of the glass dish reveal themselves to me again. The things that have accumulated in these rooms — mostly by my parents' offhand choosing — manifest a slow, insistent presence when I'm alone. I'm obliged to pay attention to each one of these things. I can't if I'm paying attention to someone else.
+ + + The next time you're alone in your room, look at the indifferent and intractable piece of furniture across from you. Unlike you or me, who can be easily seduced, it is never less than what it is. If being alone is about the recovery of a certain kind of wholeness, then you might find some of it in the wholeness of the things in your room. | c o c k t a i l s f o r o n e | My brother, my good friends and their families will spend this Thanksgiving day stringing together their habits of intimacy with each other. I won't be sitting at any of their tables this year; I have some time to spend that is so terribly slow — so slow it's almost a solid — that it is best spent alone.
+ + + When I was a boy, I did not think that my life would be the way it is, living alone in my parents' house and with this fierce disengagement from distraction. | m y b i t f o r w o r l d p e a c e | I think it was Montaigne who said that a man's inability to sit quietly in his room alone was the cause of most of the world's troubles. | e n o u g h s i l e n c e | I live alone in a wood frame and stucco house put up in the 1950s in a suburban tract where the bedroom windows of one house are exactly fifteen feet from the kitchen windows of the next. What silence there is here isn't awesome. Even in winter, with the doors and windows of the house shut, most of the public talk of my neighbors — and some of the private — leaks in. I think the houses were designed that way. My days here begin and end in silence enough — enough of a boundary around an otherwise ordinary life of work, laughter and conversation.
+ + + I listen to the not-quite-silence of my neighborhood when I'm alone. Out of it — pregnant, like the time between sleeping and waking — has come much of what I am as a man. | c e l i b a c y | The most radical course of being alone is being alone in bed.
+ + + I'm not very good at this part of my life right now. I'm not sure that I want to be. Still, I like the way the people I would love have grown more real to me because I haven't appropriated them for my benefit. The irony of sleeping alone is how easy it has become to fall in love and stay faithful. My heart abhors a vacant bed. I crowd the hospitality of mine when I'm alone with a few saints and many friends.
+ + + Circumstance makes an empty bed plausible to me. Celibacy is a family profession. My grandfather's two sisters both became cloistered Carmelite nuns in Brooklyn. Of my father's six brothers, three became priests. Even my father was, for a time, a teaching brother in a Catholic religious order. Another of his brothers married in his 50s, and another brother has never married. Of my grandmother's seven sons, only two married and had children. It was a source of distress for her. She had wished all her sons to be priests. | w h a t i ' v e g o t | My father lived his life here, in this ordinary suburb, not caring for most of the things you'd find familiar. I resented what seemed to me his lack of ambition; he was smart and strong, but his only achievement living here with us was a kind of grace. I doubt that I'll ever know his particular kind of grace. What I've achieved so far is a collection of habits that let me live on my own terms in this small house.
One habit is to listen to the calm, inward voice that will not give up talking to me when I'm alone. I admire the lack of cowardice in that voice.
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