Party of One

I went to FISHERMAN'S Wharf to watch daredevil navy pilots do stunts over San Francisco Bay. The six sleek planes dove and spiraled and sped off wing-to-wing, trailing curlicues of white smoke like whipped cream from aerosol cans. The roar of their engines drew call-and-response roars from the crowd below.
It was a crowd. Spanning two miles of waterfront on the last sunny Saturday of the year, a sea of spectators lined the railings along docks and piers, jamming walkways and lawns and traffic islands and restaurant roofs. Clots of people in colorful T-shirts waved at the sky from hotel balconies, streamed off tour buses and streetcars. Stuck in traffic, drivers and passengers craned their necks as seagulls swooped and snatched at fallen onion rings as if mocking the planes.
I thought, What am I doing here? As a rule, I avoid crowds. I am not an agoraphobe, but dislike crowds on principle. The inevitable of unwitting poke of strange elbows into breast and back. The potentiality=and it has been realized-of someone throwing up onto my shoes. The premise, the presumption implicit in any crowd, from concert hall to kaffee klatsch to office party, that shared experiences are the only ones that count. The only experiences toward which everyone aspires.The only real ones. I never liked the circus as a child, and the audience was as much the cause as the clowns. But I was in the neighborhood the day the planes came. So I said What the hell.
The spectators rippled and swirled, particolored, like clouds of confetti. Flesh to flesh. A happy crowd, as crowds go. And like all crowds, it drew from it hugeness a shared frisson. A sense of collective self. A jubilation in assembly, in the very face of its existence. Jubilation in the fact that all those persons were in one place at one time, as if their numbers, their consensus on a sunny Saturday under a sky crisscrossed with jet streams, the air redolent of fish, proved-what? That anything worth doing is not done alone.
I found a spot between a car and a family from India. I stood watching the planes, together with the crowd and yet apart.

APART.
Such a simple concept. So concrete. So easy to represent on charts or diagrams with dots and pushpins either in or out. Yet real life is not dots. Some of us appear to be in , but we are out.And that is where we want to be. Not just want but need, the way tuna need the sea.
Simple:an orientation, not just a choice. A fact. To paragphrase that Boston song, more than a feeling. We are loners. Which means we are at our best, as Orsino says in Twelfth Night, when least in company.
We do not require company. The opposite in varying degrees, it bores us, drains us, makes our eyes glaze over.Overcomes us like a steamroller. Of course, the rest of the world doesnt understand.
Someone says to you, "Lets have luch." You clench. Your sinews leap withing you, angling for escape. What others thrive on, what they take for granted, the contact and confraternity and sharing that gives them strength leaves us empty. After what others would call a fun day out together, we feel as if we have been at the Red Cross, donating blood.
This is not about hate. I did not hate the individuals in the crowd at the air show. Not the man leaving over the rail, A tatoo on his back of a baby-faced devil above the words Born Horny. I dont hate my relatives or those whose names fill my address book. But I do not want to have lunch with any of them. It is not personal. I am not angry. Nor is this about being afraid. I am not shy. I do not have terrible manners.
Do birds hate lips? Do Fijians detest snowplows? Being a loner is not about hate, but need: We need what others dread. We dread what others need.


How much better if I had known from the start, if someone had said, This is what is different about you. It would have been so simple, would have explained anything. But no one ever said. That is the point. We will not-cannot-hail each other on the street and ask, Are you this way? We will not take each other into confidence on line at Safeway.
Being as we are is just a way to be, like being good at sports or being born in Greenland. If only it were not dorky to quote Robert Frost, if he were Sufi or had died young in the Spanish Civil War, then we could seize as our motto the final three lines of " The Road Not Taken":

The roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


This way to be, this way we are, gets us into trouble. We are a minority, the community that is an anticommunity. The culture that will not on principle join hands. Remote on principle from one another-this is in our charter and we would not have it any other way-each of us swims alone through a sea of social types. Talkers. Lunchers. Touchers.
Nonloners. The world at large. The mob.
The mob thinks we are maladjusted. Of course we are adjusted just fine, not to their frequency. They take it personally.
The take offense. Feel hurt. Get angy. They do not blame owls for coming out at night, yet they blame us for being as we are. Because it involves them, or at least they believe it does, they assemble the troops and call us names.
Crazy.Cold. Stuck-ups. Standoffish. Aloof. Afraid. Lacking in social skills. Bizzare. Unable to connect. Incapable of love. Freaks. Geeks. Sad. Lonely. Selfish. Ungrateful. Unfriendly. Serial killers.

They bridle when we turn down invitations. They know we are making up excuses, but they cant handle the truth.
They cannot fathom loners any more than birds can fathom lips. The mob makes definitions and assigns identities based on the sorts of clues loners do not provide. We are elusive, not given to dressing and behaving such that we would be in stadiums raising giant foam-rubber hands proclaiming anything. We frustrate our observers, try their patience, make ourselves amorphous. Make ourselves either unintentionally scary of invisible. With the blithe assurance of a majority, the mob nods knowlingly when Justin stays home alone on Christmas Day. He is depressed, they say, or else he has something to hide. The clerk who goes home after work to have a bubble bath instead of joining the gang at the bar is declared undeserving of a raise, afraid of men, afraid of women, too smart, too stupid, scary, a pervert.
The mob posts jokes on the Net-for instance, a page called "The Loner's Home Companion," which begins: Ever had lots of spare time, a .375 Magnum burning a hole in your pocket, and an unhealthy obsession with Heather Locklear...?" And like the mock interview with "a loner" who muses: "I spend most of my free time by myself. I steer clear of crowds and social functions...I'm just a normal, average guys who will go to great lengths to avoid unnecessary human contact. Is that so wrong? No, its not. Human beings are nasty,disgusting, germ-infested vermin."
The L-word, as we hear it most often today, sounds nasty. It is the sound of a nervous music, a whine of mistrust, the hiss of fear, the dull growl of incomprehension. Animals make that sound when foreign species invade their dens, or when they find a rogue withing the herd. Loners live among the mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming. When the mob gets too close or free, any which way, we tell the mob in effect, I dont need you.
Hell hath no fury like a majority scorned.

Yet here we are, not sad, not lonely, having the time of our lives amid their smear campaign.
We are the one who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without taking a class. How to comtemplate and how to create. Loners, by virtue of being loners, in 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. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before, and the unprecendented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concertrated prayer like the desert sainds, esoteric like the cabalists. Loners, by vurtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions.
A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine, but not required.
We are the one who would rather see films than talk about them Would rather write plays than act in them Rather walk Angkor Wat and Portobello Road alone. Rather run crosscountry than in a relay race, rather surf than play volleyball. Rather cruise museums alone than with someone who lingers over early bronzes and tells us why we should adore Frida Kahlo.
Alone, we are alive.
Alone does not necessarily mean in solitude: we are not just the lone figure on the far shore. This is a populous world, and we are most often alone in a crowd. It is a state less of body than mind. The word alone should not, for us, ring cold and hollow, but hot. Pulsing with potentiality. Alone as in distinct. Alone as in, Alone in his field. As in, Stand alone. As in, like it or not, Leave me alone. This word wants rescuing, this word wants pride. This word wants to be washed and shined.
There are books, out there, about solitude. They give instructions on being alone. They books talk of "stealing away," of "retreats" and of "seeking sanctuary." They pose solitude as novelty and a desperate act: the work of theives and refugees. But for loners, the idea of solitude is not some stark departure from our normal state. We do not need writers to tell us how lovely apartness is, how sacred it was to the sages, what it did for Thoreau, that we must demand it. Those books are not for loners, not really.
By the way, I am sane. People whose job it is to know these things have told me so.


We loners do not know each other by sight. Every day we pass our brethren in the street unwitting. Sure, you might notice the solitary figure on the subway car and think, aha. But we do not exchange glances or high-fives or have our own slang or symbols. What would those be, anyway? The tarot's Hermit card? A stick figure wearing a party hat? Atiny, tightly rolled scrool in a silver capsule like Jewish mezuzahs, inscribed with the names of famous loners? Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Alec Guinness, Erik Satie, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Stanley Kubrick, James Michener, Greta Garbo, John Lennon, Piet Mondrian, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Janet Reno, St Anthony, Batman. Even that would be reductive. Would leave out so much.
Because it is all too easy to generalize. About them. About us. If this is a manifesto, it speaks for all of those-and we know who we are-for whom no one has yet spoken and who, by nature, do not seek to call attention to themselves.
Which is why a manifesto for loners cannot pretend to speak for every last loner, word for word. Generalization is impossible. It is an insult. Instead, what you will find here-the fact, opinion, research, interview, reportage, analysis, and observation-is a periscope. This is the world from here. Held up to every loner's eye, the view will be the same, but different.


The mob is not as actively hostile as it is intolerant. Even this accusation would surprise the mob. It prides itself on having evolved beyond prejudice. It parades proof of its enlightenment: its multicultural government cabinets, legal rights for same-sex partners, wheelchair access, plus-size models. Those are surely prideworthy. But no one wants to own up to the bias that thrives in full flush as the others go down in flames. This bias does not show itself in laws against us, antiloner lagislation, unless you count tax breaks for married couples with kids and higher taxes for the self-employed. It mostly shows itself-surprise, surprise!- in attitude.
Such as the fact that anything done alone is discredited, demeaned, devalued, or at best, simply undiscussed. People talk about other people, and of things they do with other people. What is done alone is preseumed dull or embarrassing. Or abstruse, like quantum physics. A guazy veil hides what is done alone: its warp is shame, its woof incomprehension. When nearly all you do is done alone, it makes the effort that is conversation that much harder, and all the more fruitless.
And consider all those phone calls at all hours from relatives and others who presume that because we are home alone we are always available, up for a chat. Being home alone, they presume, could not possible also mean being busy. Or contented exactly as you are. Unwilling to be interrupted. Different standards apply to the nonloner at a desk in an office tower. No one questions that she is really employed.
At 10 a.m and 8 p.m., loners voice-mail recorders collect evidence. I know you are there. Pick up the phone.
The bias shows itself in nosy questions. What are you doing in there? Hurt feelings. Why are you avoiding me? Catcalls. You're weired.
Say what they will, do what they will, we still know where the party is. A terribly small party, they would say.
We are part of the human race. We need our space. Get used to it.


The mob wants friends along when doing errands, working out at the gym, seeing a movie. The mob depends on advice. Eating alone in decent restaurants horrifies the mob, saddens the mob, embarrasses the mob. The mob wants friends.
The mob needs to be loved.
It lives to be loved.
Or hated, with that conjoined fervor with which mobs face their enemies. Both love and hate are all about engagement. About being linked with humanity generally, as a policy. Loners have nothing against love, but are more careful about it. Sometimes just one fantastic someone is enough. As a minority, we puzzle over nonloners, their strange values. Why do they require constant affirmation, validation, company, support? Are they babies, or what? What bothers them about being alone? What are they so afraid of? Why cant they be more like us?
Well, they cannot, nor can we be like them. Behavioral geneticists claim that human temperaments and talents-skills, preferences, modes-are inborn, like eye colors. This science is comforting insofar as it frees our parents from feeling that having loners as children is there "fault," that they "did something" to "cause" this.
Was I born this way? Does it matter how I got this way? Not if I am happy. I am. Loners need no more to be cured, nor can be cured- the word is gross in this usage - than gays and lesbians. Or people who love golf.


How could I know, when nobody told me, that I had a heritage? Beyond race or religion: another kind of sameness that bonded me with all those who had gone before, and bonded them with one another. A sameness of personality that set us apart from the majority as cleanly and as surely as the stroke of a Damascus sword. In emotion, in interest, in achievement- not that anyone would tell me, not that anyone would dignify it with a name or call it a line of succession. Its rich legacy lay everywhere, and nonloners lapped at that legacy thought its true flavor, its core and meaning, were meant just for me. And for my kind, not that I knew I had a kind.
The legacy shimmered in art museums, galleries, libraries, concert halls. In every home with electricity, with a T.V. In algebra classes and cinemas. Since the begining, loners had been out there, on their own, making and doing things. They had kept to themselves, liked their own company, thrived on their days alone. They had produced the Mona Lisa, Jungle Book, Taoism, Walden. How could I have known? In that nonloner world of teams and troops and congregations, who would have said, psst,hey,loner. Here is a grand roll call of your forbears. Protoloner.
Down the years, around the world, they form a shining line-in single file, of course. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Isaac Newton, who as a boy would rather have tinkered and solved math problems than play. Rene Descartes, the pioneering mathematician and philosopher who did his best work alone in his bed and said, " I think, therefore I am." Kipling. Thoreau. Beatrix Potter. Dickinson, who stayed home for sixteen years and wrote two thousand poems of startling passion. Lawrence of Arabia.
Crazy Horse, whom his own Sioux tribe called " the strange man" but loved him for his laconic air of mystery. Austrian born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who lived as a hermit.
All those for whom two was a crowd. Who braved the ridicule, rising time and again to the clear view through their own eyes, the wonder and horror they found and explored in themselves. Of course I would not meet them. We are not the type who meet. We do not wish to , in the flesh. We do not need to.


Nonloners borrow a term from Jung and call us introverts. They think it makes them sound intelligent to say so. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Jung devised it along with "extravert." ( He spelled it with an a) Humankind, Jung asserted, is divided into these two types, extraverts comprising three fourths of the total. The difference between the two, he said, lies in the way they perceive and interpret information.
Extraverts convern themselves with facts, with the objective, Jung said. By contrast, the introvert concerns himself with the subjective. Confronted with an identical scenario, the extravert will deduce its meaning based on what can be seen and what is recognized as true. The introvert, meanwhile, conjures a complex meaning based on individual and largely immaterail details. Impressions and opinions. He feels his own deductions to be correct, Jung wrote in 1921, yet the introvert "is not the least clear where and how they link up with the world of reality."
Acknowledging "the normal bias of the extraverted attitude against the nature of the introvert," Jung added that, for the latter, " work goes slowly and with difficulty. Either he is taciturn or he falls among people who cannot understand him; whereupon he proceeds to gather further proof of the unfathomable stupidity of man. If he should ever chance to be understtod, he is credulously liable to overestimate. Ambitious women have only to understand how advantage may be tken of his uncritical attitude towards the object to make an easy prey of him; or he may develop into a misanthropic bachelor with a childlike heart. Then, too, his outward appearance is often gauche... or he may show a remarkable unconcern, an almost childlike naivete."
Yet introverts and loners are not one and the same thing. Surely some who gain information from within and not without still enjoy company. And what of all those countless scientific loners? All those loner hacker,s loner programmers, loner inventors? Surely they rely on facts.


Loners are all types, subjective and objective thinkers, religious and atheists, soldiers and screenwriters and supermodels. We are the group that is never a group, that sneers at groups. In number theory, we mights be described as "the set of units that is not associated with any other unit." We are the confraternity whose members would rather chew Brillo pads than gather in some rathskeller to plan a strategy. We will never stage a protest march, a rally at ehich loners chorus, Do not call us on the phone!Leave, leave,leave us alone!


Because being a loner does not, in this so-populous world, guarantee confidence, Maturity. High self-esteem. To this day, I make no claim on maturity. Ours is a path marked with wonders of our own making, but also with barriers, baffles, and border gurards, and even land mines, Being ones own friend, sometimes ones only friend, is not always easy. Drawing validation and fun from withing is all well and good, but hard when we see nonloners scooping up all the prizes. My father used to say, Its not what you know, its who you know, and I did not want to believe in him. He said it ironically, wishfully, loner that he was. Networkers get promotions, commendations, raises, he said. Ass-kissers, he said. Not smart guys like himself, he meant. The schmoozers always win. The whole world is a personality cult.

Each of us loners is a point on a vast continuum. At one end is the hermit in the hut or cave, subsisting on wild herbs and water, and speaking to no one for years at a stretch. At the other end is the urbanite juggling job and family, and hoarding moments alone like pearls.
At one end are misanthropes. At the other are do-gooders:doctors for example, and philanthropists. In the middle are all the rest: a throng as diverse as the glass bits in daleidoscopes. Happy, sad. Shy, laughing at danger. Sprinting, languid. Comtemplateive, rectless. Cool, uncool.
But here. There. Having millions of tiny parties everywhere.