Someone referred to me as a ‘misanthrope’ after i confessed to an inability to tolerate human beings for long. Fair enough though it’s a little vague. i don’t hate human beings; it’s more that i need solitude – lots & lots of solitude – and clearly the human race can do little to fulfil this need. While my need for solitude is unusual, i think my attitude to my fellow men is actually quite normal; that is, i regard people with some wariness and some curiosity, and over time usually see them as full of annoying quirks, but also as ‘mostly harmless’. Although i don’t particularly hate people, i take little pleasure in prolonged contact with 99.9999% of the human race. Someone who would be fine and even interesting in small and occasional doses can easily become unbearable under different conditions.
While this obviously sounds horrible and nasty, i think this is how most people feel about their fellows. The difference here is that, for whatever reason, i am incapable of feeling lonely. The most i’ve felt – after 5 weeks of almost complete solitude - was a restlessness, easily ignored. Because i cannot feel lonely, and all my pleasures are solitary, i see no reason to seek out human company if i don’t like someone, which i hardly ever do. Most people, however, are incapable of solitude and would regard a typical weekend in Elberryland (i.e. avoiding people) as a peculiar and horrible torture. These human beings seek each other out because they are incapable of enjoying solitude, would indeed be maddened and tormented by an evening alone with a book.
My contention is that everyone is a misanthrope; the difference is that i am a well-adjusted misanthrope. If none of my friends are around (and since they mostly live in other countries or at the other end of England, they usually aren’t) i would rather relish my solitude than frantically call up everyone i know, desperate for company, for distraction.
i would propose that Nu Labour identify the part of the brain responsible for loneliness, and surgically remove it from each British citizen. Then we will be a nation of well-adjusted misanthropes and the streets will be deserted each evening as each misanthrope heads to his or her one-bedroom flat to read in peace.
I’m more sociable than you are but I also need time away from people. Without solitude, I think I would very quickly forget who I am, and the quality of my inscape be banalised. I notice how restless and vacant I can feel in company if I’ve been there for more than an hour or two -especially if the content of the conversation content is wilfully vacuous and inauthentic/pretentious.
As my dear friend Lee put it, we need to:
“in solitude, tend to the essence.”
But it’s an illusion that man is an island, etc. You are kept in constant company, are you not, by your reading? I remember that line in “Shadowlands” about why we read. We read so as to not feel alone.
But its a certain sumptuous quality of company that we crave?. That precious 0.0001% in your case (if I get my maths right). Thankfully I’d accept and hope for more.
Have you ever been not only without the company of people, but also with nothing to read, or write on, and no access to TV or radio or etc?
A worrying prospect?
Hmmm…you sound like you might have Asperger’s Syndrome, old stick.
Which, in actual fact, makes you Autistic.
Which, in my book, makes you retarded. And an absolutely useless tool at piss ups, orgies & violent riots.
Bang,
H.