The last week of November, a little before four in the afternoon. The light was already low and still going down. I was on the beach, ten minutes’ walk from my building, and I was the only person on it.
That is not a figure of speech. The beach here is two hundred metres from the road to the waterline, and that afternoon those two hundred metres held one person and one line of footprints, and the footprints were mine, laid out behind me like a sentence I had already finished. Above the seawall the town had its streetlights on and nobody walking between them. There were gulls, there was the wind, there was the small dull repeating sound the water makes when it is not doing anything in particular. Then the sun went down into the water, which in November it does, and I walked home and cooked and ate and read and went to bed at ten, and nothing happened.
I write that scene down because it is the one that people find hardest to believe, and because it is the thing they ask about first. Not the money. Not the cold. This. Don’t you get lonely out there?
It is a fair question and I have never minded being asked. But it is built on an assumption that I have never been able to accept — that being alone is a deficiency, that it is the state a person falls into when they have failed to arrange something better, and that anyone in it must be waiting, patiently or otherwise, to be rescued from it. Under that assumption, an answer like mine can only be heard as a defence.
So let me put the answer as plainly as I can, and let it stand as an answer rather than a defence.
I like living alone. It is not merely the arrangement I have chosen. It is the happiest and safest condition I have ever been in, and I can say that without qualification and without a sigh at the end of it.
Solitude is not loneliness
English has two words for this and almost everybody uses them interchangeably, which is a pity, because the difference between them is the whole subject of this chapter. Loneliness is what you feel when you are deprived of something you want. Solitude is what you have when you no longer want it.
The world does not have much room for that distinction. A man who lives by himself, does not work, does not socialise, does not appear at the gatherings he is expected to appear at, is read as a symptom — depressed, autistic, pitiable — and read that way by people who mean well. I understand where the reading comes from. Most people cannot sit in a quiet room for an hour without reaching for their phone, and a great many of them genuinely cannot bear to be alone at all; they need the group, the noise, the mutual confirmation, in order to feel that they exist. If that is your experience of being alone, then a person who chooses it for years must look like someone who has given up.
I have enjoyed quiet since I was a child. This was not a conclusion I arrived at late, after some disappointment; it was the shape I already had. And the reason it has never curdled into loneliness is not that I am unusually tough. It is that I have never been alone in the way the question assumes. There is a sea outside the window and a sky over it. There are sunsets that last half an hour and cannot be improved by anyone’s commentary on them. There are stars, in this place, in quantities that people who live in cities have forgotten are possible. When there is all of that in front of you, you are not in an empty room. Everything becomes company; everything becomes a teacher. I have read more here than I ever read in a city, and written more, and thought more, and the days have not felt thin. They have felt full, and they were full without requiring anything from anyone else.
It is worth being concrete about what those days were actually made of, because “a full life alone” sounds like a claim rather than a description. Mine were made of small ordinary things. A pot of tea carried out to the balcony in the middle of the morning, in a coat, because the flat was cold and the balcony was the warmest part of it. Two or three hours of reading, sometimes with the radio on and sometimes not. Notes towards whatever I was writing. A walk down to the water in the afternoon to see what the tide was doing, because the tide moved twice a day and something out there was keeping to a schedule even when I was not. Photographs, badly taken. A bowl of rice and two eggs. I did not have a single day in that first year that I would call eventful, and I did not have a single day that I would call empty.
That is the first thing worth saying clearly, because it is the thing the question gets wrong from the start.
The second thing is what Schopenhauer said, and I have never found a better sentence for it. Whoever does not love solitude, he wrote, does not love freedom either; for a man is free only when he is alone.
I agree with that completely. It is almost too neat to be useful as an argument, but it is true in a way that you only notice after you have lived on both sides of it. Every hour spent in company is an hour under negotiation. What to eat, where to go, how long to stay, what to talk about, whose preference gives way this time. None of that is oppression and most of it is not even unpleasant. But it is all of it a tax, and if you pay it all day you are not the owner of your time. You are a manager of it, on behalf of other people.
Living alone, I pay no tax. I have a small flat four flights up with no lift, and the sea outside the window, and there is no hour of the day that has been claimed by anybody else. If I want to sleep at two in the morning and wake at eleven, nothing in the world prevents it. If I want to eat the same thing four days running because it is what I feel like eating, nobody has to be consulted, and nobody is disappointed. If I want to spend a whole afternoon reading and then walk down to the water at four for no reason, that is not a decision that anyone else has to be informed of.
People in cities are alone too, but I do not think it is the same condition, which is why the advice to go somewhere and be by yourself never works for them. In a city, being alone is a gap in a schedule. You are alone in a flat with thin walls, on a street with a million people on it, and the ache comes from the contrast — from the fact that all that company is visibly available and none of it is yours. Here the aloneness is not a gap in anything. It is the whole fabric of the day, and nothing in the surroundings contradicts it. There is no crowd outside my window that I am failing to belong to. That difference is not a mood, it is a structure, and it is the reason the same quantity of solitude that would corrode a person in a tower block does not corrode anyone here: there is no noise on the other side of the wall for the quiet to be measured against.
I have heard this called selfishness. It probably is, in the sense that it takes the resources of one life and spends them entirely on the person living it. The counter-argument, which I have made to myself more than once on rainy afternoons, is that a life spent pleasing others is not automatically generous either. A great deal of what passes for sociability is not warmth. It is performance, and scorekeeping, and the careful management of other people’s opinions of you, and the reason I withdrew from it is not that I am above it but that I am bad at it and paying for it in energy I would rather spend on something else.
That is what I mean when I say I am sensitive, and it is not a compliment to myself. Put me in a room with other people and I cannot stop noticing. I notice when someone has been left out of a conversation, and I feel obliged to bring them in. I notice when a joke has landed badly, and I feel obliged to smooth it over, and I do it before I have decided to. I notice the small tightening in a face, and I begin arranging my own words to relieve it. None of this is asked of me. All of it happens anyway, all evening, and by the time I get home I am empty in a way that sleep does not fix. Ten people can be pleasant company and still cost me two days to pay for. Alone, I am never in debt. There is no one to be careful for, no one to explain myself to, no version of myself I have to maintain. The mask comes off at the door and there is nothing underneath it that needs adjusting.
So the argument runs: no audience, no performance; no performance, no exhaustion; no exhaustion, and a great deal of time, and a great deal of quiet, and the entire sky, and no one to argue with about what to do with any of it.
The cost, told honestly
I did not want to write a chapter that only lists the good part. That would be a brochure, and brochures are how people end up here in November without a plan.
So here is what it costs. The first cost is speech. Language is a muscle and mine has gone soft. I can go three or four days without speaking to another human being, and when I do speak, I hear myself stumbling over the middle of a sentence, or pausing in the wrong place, or reaching for a word that I know perfectly well and cannot produce in time. I am told this is normal and reversible. I believe it. But I notice it, and noticing it is a small tax that the brochures do not mention.
The second cost is harder to describe without sounding theatrical, and I will try anyway, because it is real. On some days — grey days, rainy days, days when the wind is coming off the water and the light never quite arrives — the quiet stops being a presence and becomes an absence, and something opens up underneath the day and I find myself standing at the edge of it. Not sadness, exactly. More like a sudden view of how little my being here is anchored to anything. It lasts an hour, or an afternoon, and then it closes over, and the next morning there is sun on the floor again and the whole thing looks like a bad night’s sleep.
I have never resolved that. I have simply compared it with the alternative. And when the two are laid side by side — an occasional hour of vertigo, against the daily cost of a life arranged around other people’s expectations — the comparison has never once come out in favour of going back. I do not say that the way a man defends a decision he has already made. I say it the way you report a subtraction.
I am probably going to live this way for the rest of my life. I have arranged my thinking around that rather than treating it as a phase. And I should be clear that this is not sulking, or a verdict on anyone else, or a reaction to anything. It is closer to arithmetic. Here are the four parts of it.
I will not build a family. I cannot picture sharing a home with another person, and I have stopped pretending that this is a matter of not having met the right one. A family is not primarily a source of warmth. It is a set of obligations, a permanent negotiation, an endless series of decisions that are no longer yours to make alone. The only thing that would change my mind is the genuine mutual understanding of two people who want the same things at the same time — and I think that miracle is close to nonexistent in practice. Since being alone is the safest condition I know, there is no reason to voluntarily give it up for a version of company that I would find exhausting.
I will drift, and then I will stop. I have no intention of nailing myself to one place while I still have the body and the money to move. While I can, I would rather be a watcher of the world than a participant in it — going slowly from one region to the next, staying long enough to learn what winter is like there, and what people eat, and how they talk. Later, when I can no longer move easily, I will find some small quiet town with a decent climate, buy a small flat, and stop. Where I die is a detail and I keep changing my mind about it — for a while I was sure it would be by the sea, then I went to Yunnan and decided a Dai village in the south would be just as good. The place does not matter. Staying independent does.
I know what the suspicion is, and I would rather meet it than leave it standing. A person who removes himself from ordinary life is generally assumed to be running from something — a failure, a humiliation, some private wreck he does not want to talk about. I have been asked, more politely than that, whether I came here to hide. The honest answer has two parts. The first is that a person who has withdrawn does not owe anyone a reason, and the demand for one is a fair sample of the thing he withdrew from. The second is that my reason was not an event. I did not leave because something happened. I left because a great many things had been happening for a very long time, none of them dramatic, and I had finally noticed how little of myself was coming back out of it. There is no villain in that sentence, which is precisely what makes it difficult to explain. People prefer a story with a villain. It gives them somewhere to put the blame and leaves the question of their own arrangement alone.
I have thought about illness, and I am not romantic about it. The argument used on people like me is always the same: who will bring you water when you are old, what will you do if you get sick. It is a serious question and it deserves a serious answer, but it is usually asked as though it had only one. It does not. Children are not a guarantee; ask anyone whose parent needed them and found them busy. And of any two people in a marriage, one is going to be left alone in the end. So the plan is not to be rescued. The plan is to keep my eating and my sleeping regular, to move my body, and to stay calm enough that my body does not have to pay for my temper. If I get ill: endure the small things, let the big ones go, and pay for a hospital when it becomes unbearable. If I reach the point of not being able to look after myself, I will spend what I have on a carer or a place in a care home — or, if they exist by then in a usable form, on whatever the machines have become. And if I arrive at the far end of it with no money and no dignity left, then I do not think of that as tragedy. I think of it as an ending arriving on time. Death is not the enemy in that sentence; losing the ability to choose is.
I will come alone and leave alone, and I do not need a monument. Nobody is born in company. Nobody dies in company either, whatever the room looks like when it happens. I have thought about the disposal of my own body and I would prefer it to be useful and cheap: the ashes into the sea, which is free, or the body donated to a medical school so that students can learn anatomy on it. In Chinese, a donated body is called a silent teacher. It is a better phrase than anything English has for it, and it is the last job I can imagine wanting.
If I have lived this way on purpose — seen the mountains and the sea, eaten what I wanted when I wanted it, gone to bed at two when I felt like it, and put down the burden of being somebody’s version of a respectable person — then walking alone to the end of it is not something anyone needs to feel sorry about. It is not a sad ending. It is the same ending everyone gets, arrived at with my own footing.
The beach again
I went back down the following afternoon. The wind had come round to the north and cleaned the water out, and it was the deep jade green it turns in the cold months, and the tide was going out and the sand was holding the marks the last one had left.
Nobody came. Nobody called. Nothing was required of me for the two hours I stood there, and at the end of them the sun went into the sea and the sky did the thing it does in winter, and I walked home up the four flights of stairs. The sea does not ask me anything. It does not remember that I was there yesterday or care whether I come tomorrow. It has no opinion about how I spend my life, which is, when you think about it, exactly the kind of company I was looking for.