One, Alone
September 22, 2019
ALAN writes:
I know exactly how Paul A. feels. [“Hardships of the Single Life, cont.”, Sept. 2 ] He is only 50. I am 20 years older and intimately acquainted with the kind of life he describes.
“Everything is far away,” he wrote. And that is true. But I remember a time when it wasn’t true. Cities once consisted of self-sufficient neighborhoods where everything was not far away. Older men and women in St. Louis have written about how, during their childhood years, everything their family needed could be found within walking distance. That was true for us in the 1950s.
Then came a variety of factors to explode that arrangement: Motor vehicles, highways, the development of mass marketing, the invention of the teenager and then the youth subculture, the destruction of neighborhoods, and the surrender of local power and law to distant places, among others. Alan Ehrenhalt discussed many of these factors in his 1995 book The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, which I recommend.
I once knew an older man who lived alone for 50 years. He and his wife had separated and neither ever remarried. In some ways, he told me, it was a terrible way to live, and it could be terribly lonely. He was right. I learned it, too, from long experience.
Marriage, a family, and a home are not in the cards for many men, partly because of consequences of some of their own choices, and partly because of other circumstances. A solitary life has a few advantages, but also many disadvantages. The absence of conversation and companionship is often unbearable. Then, later in life, when all the connections vanish as people die, one after another after another, there is no one left to share the memories—nothing but a dead end of absence and silence.
At “View from the Right”, Lawrence Auster wrote of his odd and eccentric life, having worked at different jobs and never feeling part of a mainstream. Much the same was true for me: I discovered at ages 16-18 that I was beginning to favor ideas that put me at odds with most people around me in those years; not at odds in a radical revolutionary sense, but in a radical conservative sense. Attempts were made to groom me into becoming a “group person”, a person who would learn to be “well-adjusted.” I vaguely resented that, then I resisted it with militant determination and confidence. I always wondered about the part that was omitted from all that talk about “well-adjusted.” Well-adjusted to what?, I wanted to know. The standards of adolescents? Excuses and evasions? Falsehoods that “authorities” in the mid-1960s were declaring to be true? Masses of people who would “go along to get along”?
Of course posing such questions will always get you into trouble, as I learned the hard way.
All of that took place more than 50 years ago. Am I happy about it? No. Has a solitary life brought happiness with it? No. If it were mine to do all over again, would I aim instead for marriage, a family, and a home? Absolutely yes.
The older man I mentioned above was my father. Because of their separation, he and my mother lived alone for the rest of their lives. It was not true that their lives were miserable, and each of them, separately, enjoyed many days of happiness—but also much unhappiness.
As I looked back on their lives after they died, one of the great ironies in my mother’s life occurred to me. On sunny days half a century afterward, I walked slowly around the St. Louis Municipal Opera in Forest Park and gazed at the many rows of seats on the hillside opposite the stage, imagining her seated there in the audience on summer nights in the 1940s to enjoy a presentation of Sigmund Romberg’s “The Desert Song”, which was very popular with St. Louis audiences in those years, and to hear Edward Roecker’s glorious voice in his role as The Red Shadow. One of her favorite songs in that operetta was “One Alone.”
And that was how she lived for much of her life: One alone, partly but not entirely by her choice.
Her life, my father’s life, and mine—any of the three could stand as an argument in favor of marriage and a family.
— Comments —
Patrick O’Brien writes from Denver:
Wonderful, sad comment-article by Alan about loneliness. This line seems very applicable to the Church today:
Then, later in life, when all the connections vanish as people die, one after another after another, there is no one left to share the memories—nothing but a dead end of absence and silence.
I am almost seventy years old, happily married with grandchildren, with many interests and connections to traditional communities of various stripes in my city. My wife and I are far from alone. But the line above is what has happened to the Church. Millions have been abandoned, and “New Church” moves on. Join in or remain alone. And when conviction urges you to remain outside the mainstream, you suffer a sort of martyrdom.
By the way, your choice of “One Alone” hit home in a good way. We have an old 78 rpm record of my mother singing that song, from about 1940. Mother was a star soprano and recorded three Romberg songs when she was in her very early twenties. I still have the sheet music and play these songs at nursing homes.
Laura writes:
It’s not fun living through the Great Apostasy.
