Loneliness Is My Middle Name

"Behind the Scenes" of Episode 3

Wanderer Above the Sea and Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

My wife is a “giver of names.” She comes from a family in which the bestowing of nicknames is routinely performed as a kind of playfully serious rite of passage, and she proudly carries on that tradition. You know that you have been welcomed into her inner circle when you are spontaneously christened with a new, and often silly, name.

I’ve been reflecting this past week on names and naming in the light of the most recent episode of the podcast: Receiving One’s True Name. In particular, I’ve been thinking about the experience of loneliness that I spoke about in that episode — the loneliness that inevitably visits a person who does the difficult work of learning to live into their “true name.”

One of the very first nicknames that my wife ever gave to me (there have been several) was “the archetypally lonely man.” It was her way of gently teasing me about my tendency to wander off by myself to be alone with my thoughts, or to stare off into the distance at nothing in particular, sometimes not noticing who was coming or going around me.

When we first moved to the little beach town where we now live we joked that it had something to offer each of us. She could enjoy the crowded beach in the summer, playing in the water and chatting with friends and strangers alike, and I could roam the dark, deserted beach in winter, soaking up the enchanted mood of the vast and lonely sea.

Now, to be sure, there is something in her choice of nickname for me that reflects an extravert’s misunderstanding of the introvert — aloneness does not always mean loneliness. Nevertheless, there is still some truth in it. It wasn’t just teasing. My wife is a very intuitive person and she was picking up on something in me that has always had a far away quality, something solitary and even inaccessible. Loneliness is, indeed, one of my names.

I want to be clear. When I speak of my loneliness, I don't mean something that makes me feel sorry for myself in any way. In fact, it is often an experience in which I feel most at home in myself. And though there is definitely a kind of melancholy that accompanies it, it is not what I would call sad. It is poignant. Wistful. It is like the salty breeze off the ocean at night whose sharp bite stirs the heart, awakening it to gratitude and to a deep appreciation for what is.

Loneliness, as I said in the last episode, is an entry into a fundamental experience of being human. It is not alienation. In loneliness there is longing and depth and imagination. In loneliness the other is intensely alive, fully present even in their absence. It is only through our separateness that we truly become conscious of the other, that we discover the reality of the other. And it is through this discovery, born of our separateness, that love becomes possible. And so, in some unexpected way, loneliness is the soil out of which love grows.

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Sometimes the other we discover in this experience is our very self. “The highest and most decisive experience of all,” writes Jung, “is to be alone with one’s own self.” It is only this, he states, that enables a person to come to know the real ground of his or her being. “Only this experience,” Jung declares, “can give one an indestructible foundation.”

A very similar idea is expressed by the poet Rilke, in a beautiful poem called Sunset:

Sunset
by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

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To me, those lines, “one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth, / leaving you, not really belonging to either,” are resonant with the loneliness of existence. The awareness of the two worlds we inhabit — heaven and earth — begins with the recognition of our separateness from each of them. In some way, it seems, we cannot really know either until we know both. But knowing both means belonging to neither.

To belong too much to one or the other of these two worlds makes us partial, not yet full inhabitants of life. Earth without heaven, says Rilke, is “hopelessly dark.” And without the activity, the variety, the transience of time-bound existence, heaven is “unswerving” — changeless, eternal monotony.

Suspended between these two great powers all we can do is simply and humbly turn to ourselves, to our own little lives — “timid and standing high and growing.” And it is there, perhaps, “alone with one’s own self” as Jung says, that we might discover we are not separate after all. “One moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.” The two worlds, we discover, dwell within.

None of this is to say that loneliness is an easy experience. Even when one feels called to it, named by it, as I do, there is a natural resistance that surrounds it. There are so many ways that I still avoid or distract myself from my feelings of loneliness — watching TV, scrolling social media, even sometimes by reading. I do these things even though I know that avoiding loneliness, which of course is a way of avoiding myself, only leaves me feeling more lonely than if I had just let myself embrace it.

I guess I need to spend more time at the beach.

Until next time.

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Coming up this weekend:

• Circumambulating the Self — An in-depth exploration of Jung’s concept of the Self on Saturday, November 12th through the C.G. Jung Institute of New England. For more information visit: www.cgjungne.com/circumambulating-the-self-with-jason-e-smith/