Me, Myself, I.

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I’ve been reading a few posts on here recently that speak of the pleasure of one’s own company, particularly when accompanied by a good book. But this morning I came across a different note on my feed that will I think resonate with many, about the friendship gap that sometimes opens up in midlife, particularly once children are grown or flown or when circumstances and choices have simply moved on. On the one hand, this new stage can bring welcome solitude, but it can also introduce a touch of loneliness. It isn’t necessarily either one or the other: both states can exist at different times. Inevitably my mind reached for the vocabulary of being alone, and what its stories tells us.

To start with ‘solitude’, that word’s etymology is simple enough: the Latin solus, which is also the root of ‘solitary’, ‘solo’, and ‘solipsism’, the philosophy that only one’s own mind can be certain to exist. Most of these words can look both ways depending on their context: a solitary walk can be exhilarating, solitary confinement is anything but. Firmly in the negative camp, and from the same family of words, ‘is ‘desolate’, made up of the Latin de, ‘utterly’, and that same solus, alone.

Solitude is usually sought out, a state of seclusion that is deliberate and restorative. In the 18^th century there was a word to describe not just the desire to be alone, but specifically the need to be away from other people. This is ‘apanthropy’, from the Greek for ‘away from humanity’ and defined in one of the dictionary’s examples as ‘a species of melancholy characterised by a dislike to society’. I would beg to differ here, since apanthropists the world over make a positive choice to withdraw when the world becomes too loud. A few years ago, when I was writing a book on the language of emotions, I came across the story of St Simeon the Stylite, a monk in ancient Syria whose example of devotion attracted hundreds of noisy disciples. In search of respite, he climbed to the top of a 60-foot-tall column to get away from it all. According to the story, he stayed there for the next thirty years.

Solitude for many of us, and certainly for the Romantics of the 19^th century, is frequently found in nature. William Wordsworth both ‘wandered lonely as a cloud’ and ‘alone amid the heart of many thousand mists’ to find the peace he craved. One of my favourite words from German is Waldeinsamkeit, literally ‘forest solitude’ and a peace found when walking alone beneath a protective canopy of trees. Swedish offers us gökotta, a highly specific term for waking early in order to take in the stillness of the morning and tune into the first birdsong of the day.

Loneliness, of course, is very different. It’s a word whose very construction tells a story of being apart. It began with ‘alone’, an adjective which emerged in the 12^th century as a simple blending of the two words ‘all one’ – in other words there is no one else present. At some point the a drifted off in search of other company and left ‘lone’ in its wake as well as, eventually, ‘lonely’. The ‘one’ is still sitting there if you look for it.

That idea of ‘oneness’ is hidden in other words too. To ‘atone’ for something is to make amends and return to being ‘at one’ with the person we have wronged. More prosaically, the Latin unus, ‘one’, is nestling within ‘onion’, since an onion has a single bulb as opposed to the many you will find in, say, garlic.

Linguistically, ‘loneliness’ didn’t exist prior to the 17^th century – or at least not in the melancholy sense we mean it today. Before then, the line between loneliness and solitude seemed far less clear. But by the 1800s the phrase ‘lonesome-fret’ was being documented in Devonian dialect to describe a feeling of restless unease that comes from being on one’s own for far too long.

Loneliness of course comes in many forms, including a sense of being entirely disconnected from the world around us. The word ‘alienation’ is built upon the Latin for ‘belonging to another’ or ‘strange’, articulating how we can feel estranged even in a crowd of other people (surely one of the most acute feelings of loneliness there is). The poetic ‘forlorn’ is equally rooted in absence, since it means ‘to lose utterly’: to be forlorn is not just to be alone, but to have been forsaken by others.