Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone."
We can thank one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, Paul Johannes Tillich, a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian, for this rather elegant explanation of the difference between loneliness and solitude.
My love of the glory of solitude has deepened for me with age. This may well be an old man thing that comes from a sense of time running out and not wanting to waste a moment of it. As Einstein wrote, "I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity."
Sitting on the bench at the back of "Melbourne" on a hot day, with bees humming in dozens of shoulder-high callistemons which I planted only a few years ago, with the expanse of "Riverbend" before me and the slowly-flowing river on two sides, I revel in the mere act of breathing in and breathing out. Solitude fills me with peacefulness and a simple gratitude for being alive which all too often tends to get lost in the crowd.
Mind you, I am not so sold on solitude as was Henry David Thoreau, the American philosopher who spent months on end alone on Walden Pond. Wrote Thoreau: "I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude." (while writing about the importance of solitude, Thoreau would run into town and have people cook dinner for him, and before heading back into the woods, he would dump his laundry at his mother's house.)
I still value my time with good friends but only in short bursts. Just now I received an email from an old - in both senses of the word - work colleague who had dropped in on us at about this time five years ago, totally unannounced and uninvited. At the time, he was just passing through and we improvised with a hastily thrown-down mattress on the floor of the library and made him feel welcome for the - what? - two or three nights of his stop-over which required few changes to our lives.
He now wants to come to "Riverbend" to spend his holiday here. "How long would you put up with a grumpy old man and his 'she who-must-be-obeyed', of course?" he asked. If it's just for another two or three nights, no problem (although our guest cottage is now our movie house and choc-full with my DVD collection, and since his last visit I had to strip its bathroom which had been infested by termites, and it's been left bare and unlined since then, which creates some creature comfort problems).
So what do I tell him? That I prefer my solitude? That I would rather spend my remaining time breathing in and out on my bench behind "Melbourne" than spend it being the life of the party? Or do I just send him this post?
