Greta Garbo wanted to be alone, but most people didn’t. They thought it exotic. That one of the great beauties of the age should choose loneliness when all humanity was available for her companionship seemed spooky and probably added to Garbo’s allure by suggesting a dark preference in tastes that was utterly alien to the American zest for human commotion.
This was in time past, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, when Sweden and solitude were still as remote as Cambodia and sheriffs campaigning for the homosexual vote. In time present, loneliness seems to be the aspiration of depressingly large numbers of Americans. Looking at the growing numbers of persons proclaiming happiness from the solitude of private burrows, you wonder whether we are becoming a race that is simply afraid of people or whether we are finding such joy in self-love that it can only be spoiled by human contact.
Youth is reluctant to marry. When it does, it is reluctant to produce children, but quick to divorce. When men and women live together, in wedlock or out, the arrangement is often formalized as a “relationship.” Sometimes this is defined in legal contracts, as though it were a deal for an exchange of services between parties who distrust each other.
These “relationships” are commonly designed to provide the parties with escape clauses to be invoked when long-term human involvement produces its inevitable messiness. The distaste for the messiness of human relationships is not new, of course. It has always been a characteristic of one of the stock comic figures of American society, the crotchety bachelor who avoids entangling alliance because he can’t stand babies’ diapers and women’s stockings drying over his bathtub.
What made the bachelor comic was his willful refusal to undertake life’s interesting complications, the sterility of the life he deliberately chose because he was too timid to try the water. Nowadays, however, the bachelor is no longer the source of comic literature and film but a figure of admiration whose example is celebrated as a happy adjustment to the exigencies of a mean-spirited society.
The women’s movement attempts to lionize the female bachelor. Newspapers, books and magazines recite happy tales of women who, having successfully skirted the perils of husbands and nest building, have found contented anchorage in private harbors alone with their TV sets, their books, their wine, their pictures, their telephones and their self-fulfillment.
This is a long remove from the day when settlers traveled heavy miles a few times a year to escape the loneliness of prairie solitude in quilting bees and harvest feasts. A long distance even from a not-so-distant time when Americans pulled out of one-horse towns and dusty backwaters and poured into New York seeking people, life, adventure, love and the messiness of human connections.
Nowadays Americans come to New York to be alone, and the drift toward loneliness is nowhere better illustrated than in the changing sexual customs. A recent report in The New York Times tells of a spreading “asexuality” among New Yorkers. Increasing numbers of persons, it states, are finding that abstinence from sex develops into atrophy of sexual appetite, which makes it quite easy for them to live contentedly without sex.
Not long ago a man told me of a woman who went to an “asexual bar” to pick up men because she could be sure there was no risk of any human involvement. I thought he was joking, but now it seems entirely probable that “asexual bars” will sprout throughout the city to accommodate the growing demand for places where people who want to be alone can do so with people like themselves.
“Asexuality” was preceded by “solosexuality,” a practice, heavily dependent upon machinery, which permitted people to subdue the natural instinct for human companionship with the aid of mechanical devices and illustrated manuals on the art of being your own irresistible lover.
“Solosexuality” developed out of “omnisexuality,” a product of improved contraceptive technology which permitted people to satisfy the craving for human relationship almost as readily as the craving for an afternoon newspaper, and without much more risk of human involvement. “Asexuality,” however, opens the possibility of a society in which perfect loneliness can finally be achieved.
There is a rather elegant nursing home I visit from time to time. In a certain wing almost everyone is totally alone except, now and then, for the occasional visit of someone like myself, the small residue of long-forgotten, messy human relationships. Minds wander in the past here, coming to rest briefly in a moment in 1910 when a younger brother got a thrashing from his daddy, then lurching forty years ahead to the moment of a son’s marriage, a husband’s death. Loneliness is almost absolute to the visitor, unable to cross into those dead worlds. He realizes that he may very well end here if he jogs assiduously and avoids tobacco. And if so, will there be people out of the past, people who have to be married, people who have to be buried, day after day, to pass the time? If not, what a loneliness.