Individual freedom and the need for connection

There is something exhilarating about moving to a city where nobody knows you. The anonymity can be intoxicating. People look through you without expectations beyond the simple social demands not to be stepped on or cheated. I realized this for the first time almost forty years ago, when I took a job in a major American city and observed the faces as I walked around the busy downtown at lunchtime. Some people were noticeably fearful and others were threatening, but most faces were blank, hiding unknown thoughts, revisiting the past or anticipating the future. But none of them were focused on me. I was not a part of their experience, even when I jostled against them in the subway. I was truly alone, perhaps for the first time in my life. And I felt more inner comfort in isolation than I had ever known before.

As a writer, I am never alone. I may work in a room by myself, but my words always go out to an audience, and when there is none in sight I fabricate one, even if it is just another side of myself. I project active thoughts over to my listening self as if to somebody else, as if the writer and the editor in me were separate people. And at bottom I am always writing for a listener. I have read out loud to my absent mother for many years, and continued to use her as a sounding board even after she died. My younger brother was the imagined listener whenever I thought about organized sports, and when he died my interest in sports dried up as well. My older brother was the target for every unconventional thought I had. I would call him to share odd facts, or to look at a web site I had found that seemed to make music visible. My thoughts about religion would not have advanced as they did if I had not been corresponding with a friend in Israel. Now, without him, they are moribund.

In theory, I understand the need for community, I understand why people want to constantly relate to others. At the odd periods of my life when I have been employed, I have found meeting people to be the most pleasant part of the job -- far better than being paid. Today, in a new city, I am working as a volunteer at the food bank. The job keeps me in touch with men and women with various handicaps, physical or social. Most have been injured by their collision with the vicissitudes of life. I have met men just released from jail, women who have smoked and sat in the sun so much they have shriveled their skin far more than nature would have done in their thirty years.

Something in me simply wants the connection, wants to nourish the hope that somebody somewhere on the road will be worth knowing as a friend. Reinforcing that, I harbor a perversely moral side that wants to help the world even if I cannot cure it. But that is in theory only. In practice, I have never known anybody who was more self-contained than I am. My years in isolation were the most significant and rewarding I have ever known. I am my own best friend.