At peace with one self

By choice or necessity, permanently for some and intermittently for the rest, each of us is going to be alone. If you’re among the few who are perfectly happy in solitude, the prospect of a half-empty life fills you with joy. If you’re not ready for trekking through jungles on your own -- or even a meal by yourself -- then you’re a member of a lonely crowd.

That’s how Berkeley-based essayist and critic Anneli Rufus divvies up the world in her often cranky but always absorbing survey of estranged lifestyles in “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” The distinction she makes is between being alone and being lonely. From solo sex to urban camouflage fashion to the choice of a home town (she nominates the “loner’s paradise” of self-absorbed Los Angeles), Rufus whips together memoir, reportage and some urgent propagandizing to separate those who are happy alone from the unhappy “nonloners.” She may even be -- with deliberate irony -- the founder of a new “loner pride” movement, if only the true loners could unite.

The true loner (and Rufus includes herself and her husband) is eager to have you cut short your visit, cheerfully prefers the Internet to personal contact, doesn’t want to see your unwashed face on the other side of the bed and is unpersuaded that “[s]hared experiences are the only ones that count.” That doesn’t make the true loner misanthropic, selfish or irrational, Rufus believes. Nor is he -- and loners are almost always thought of as men -- the iconic single white male between the ages of 25 and 50, from whose morose ranks are supposed to come the next Theodore Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, John Wayne Gacy and all postal gunmen and the creeps who dine on the bodies of their dead.

They are, in Rufus’ careful segregation of who’s in and who’s out, pseudoloners who give being deliberately alone such a bad name.

The frightening “loner” of the newspaper headline -- supposedly nursing grudges that go back to junior high school -- is a crude stereotype that passes for criminal profiling in the media and among some police departments. “Party of One” provides plenty of illustrations of loner stereotyping, including all of the cases above as well as the strange story of 15-year-old Charles Bishop -- the son of parents who had failed in their own teenage suicide attempt -- who flew a small plane into the side of a Tampa office building in early 2002.

Bishop was instantly branded a classic loner in world headlines on the strength of a suicide note that had kind words for Osama bin Laden. His solitary habits were then picked apart in the media to support his loner-as-killer label. Except, as reporters were forced to admit afterward, he didn’t have any loner characteristics. Bishop was popular with his high school classmates and teachers, volunteered to tutor first-graders, played on school teams and was more than conventionally patriotic. That Bishop wasn’t an outcast loner left everyone baffled, Rufus adds with justifiable sarcasm. “Like the bogeyman and the witches and ogres in fairy tales, the criminal-as-loner serves a social function. It sets the criminal apart from ordinary people, from the masses, designating him as a freak, a demon, and an alien. This ties up matters neatly. It explains things.”

We like living in a demon-haunted world, Carl Sagan complained -- a world where all men named David Nelson are automatically frisked by wary airport security guards just because that name appears on a roster of terrorism suspects -- and Rufus is more right today than ever to insist that no one be demonized. Rufus’ manifesto for loner liberation seems trivial only until you recall that fascism, Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism -- all the 20th century’s efforts to coerce quirky individuals into an army marching in the same direction -- demonized anyone who stood apart from the enthusiastic crowd. Because I bear the loner’s stigma, as a 50ish white male with a typically preoccupied air who lives quietly by himself and about whom -- it’s only natural -- my suburban neighbors talk, I want my neighbors and my government to resist their anxious contemplation of me and everyone else like me when we are merely uncongenial.

Loners can’t help their preference for being alone, of course. In the evolutionary psychology of Steven Pinker, being one of the happy alone is as hard-wired in the brains of true loners as eye color is hard-wired in the genes of nonloners. As Rufus writes, “Yet here we are, not sad, not lonely, having the time of our lives amid their smear campaign.... Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave -- like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors.... A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions.”

Heroic and misunderstood, true loners have seen the future, and in Rufus’ libertarian reformulation of John Donne, every man is an island. “We no longer need to be social animals in order to survive as a species. Mandatory social interaction is an evolutionary remnant which those who wish to may discard.... There are systems in place to take care of criminals and children and the ill. There are so many people out there, doing so many things, that your being a loner, or my being one, or that guy over there, will not hold back the human race.” Your participation, Rufus says, is now optional.

The loners’ option proposes to answer the question of how to be in the world. Rufus’ radical answer -- only disconnect! -- is chilling, naive and not much more than the romance of identity politics and a consoling list of loner heroes and martyrs: Isaac Newton, Kurt Cobain, Emily Dickinson, Barry Bonds, Thomas Merton, Anne Rice, Superman, the Marlboro Man and the Lone Ranger (“Tonto not withstanding,” Rufus explains).

Rufus seems to think that we are only sovereign selves (putting aside how historically conditioned that sovereignty is). She’s proud that we’ve become like gods without a religion.

Loners may prefer to pay taxes to a custodial state rather than pay attention to the teenager thinking of suicide or the homeless mother or -- to up the stakes -- the gulag, the death camp or the scene of the massacre. Impersonal governments don’t neatly handle the things that loners would prefer not to, and what little good is done by dispassionate systems is done with what little compassion we bring to them.

How alone is alone enough? The poet William Carlos Williams wrote of dancing naked and alone in his room before a mirror, singing softly, “I am lonely, lonely. / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!” and thought of himself as the happy genius of his household. In the West of our dreams, Shane rides away from the isolated homestead alone -- a hero who saved a marriage and joined in the domestication of the frontier. Hermit saints answered by fleeing into the desert, and some of them made the mistake of taking pride in their singularity. We are all alone, each of us, and the whole, teeming world is our hermitage.

The American theologian and disenchanted socialist Reinhold Niebuhr believed that nothing we do, however virtuous, is accomplished alone. “Therefore,” he said, “we are saved by love.” The hardest thing in the world isn’t just to live in it, but to live in it fully aware of what’s mis- sing. If hell is other people, if Sartre’s despairing antihero was right, then that’s where all of us are, and there’s no exit from it. Our only redemption is in making up the lack we encounter in each other, the pilgrims we unwillingly welcome to the desert island of ourselves.