Some notes on what seems to be out there, and what some of us have sampled....

Did Greta Garbo really want to be alone?  Does anyone?  Maybe they do.

Party of One: The Loners' Manifesto, Anneli Rufus,
Marlowe & Co.: 286 pages, $14.95 paperback

This is a curious little book by the Berkeley-based essayist and critic Anneli Rufus.  Perhaps this caught my eye because Rufus here explains how one's choice of one's home town is a reflection of whether one is comfortable being alone, or whether one is one of those folks who needs to be with people, needs to be in a relationship or cannot imagine going to a movie alone, or to a restaurant alone, or on a trip alone.  Where one decides to live is an indicator of which of these two sorts of people you are.  She nominates the "loner's paradise" to be self-absorbed Los Angeles.  Yeah, well.

Here's the disclosure statement.  I live alone, except for Harriet-the-Surly-Housecat (see the archive page for a photo) so I have my biases.  I've lived alone for the last thirteen years, and in Los Angeles.  I enjoy traveling alone and cannot imagine how I would have met those characters I did on my trips to Paris had I been with another person, with a partner.  I wouldn't have traded ideas on chord progressions with Philippe the street guitarist on long afternoons up on Place des Abbesses, or chatted politics with Sabine at her boyfriend in an obscure café daily for weeks.  I wouldn't have chatted with about Merce Cunningham with those two dancers who wanted me to stay an extra week to see them perform at Opéra Bastille, or with the repairman who popped out of a manhole one rainy afternoon and asked me for a light, or with the young security guard at the airport (CDG) while waiting to catch the non-stop back to Los Angeles the morning after that fellow failed to get his exploding sneakers to ignite on his own trip from Paris to Miami.  I would, instead, have been talking to my companion, my partner.  So I conclude traveling alone, and living alone, opens you up to new things.

And this seem to be what Rufus is getting at.   She seeks to separate those who are happy alone from the unhappy "nonloners."   As one reviewer put it, "She may even be - with deliberate irony - the founder of a new 'loner pride' movement, if only the true loners could unite."  Perhaps.

This is a summary from D.J. Waldie's review in the July 20th, Los Angeles Times:

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.

As Rufus says in the book, "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."

Yeah, we loners aren't necessarily crazed murders - except now and then, when I find myself down on Sunset stuck behind a rental Chevy Cavalier full of a tourist family from Iowa driving at a crawl while reading maps and pointing out the windows, weaving left and right, making sudden inexplicable stops and starts and making me nervous when I just want to get home, well, then I might have a murderous thought or two.  But not really.

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."

Well, thats laying it on a bit thick.  I enjoy my single (solitary) life.  But it hardly seems heroic.

But Rufus hammers on: "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 book reviewer Waldie comments, "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 missing.  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."

I dont know about Reinhold Niebuhr.  I do remember Steve Martin's movie The Lonely Guy as kind of painful to watch.  Perhaps Steve Martin was thinking of Reinhold Niebuhr.  Or not.  And I tend to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre's "antihero" mentioned here, but only partially.  Hell can be other people, but then, sometimes not.  Depends on the people.  No Exit?  Sometimes there's an exit.

Guess I haven't come across the right people for some time.

This book, then, is a bit over the top.  But not so wrong. 

Mick Jagger, Vaclav Havel, Bill Clinton and Frank Zappa