Soltero

"My life's work... requires autonomy like oxygen." (Anzaldúa) One finds similar ideas, as we will see later in this post, in D.H. Lawrence, in Sylvia Townsend Warner, in Samuel Butler, in Marina Tsvetaeva, in lord knows how many others. The desperate quest for solitude and autonomy runs as a persistent enough theme through all known literature (-- or, perhaps, it is just consistent enough in my own life that it always lifts itself off the page, unsolicited, of whatever I am reading) that one might be tempted to credit it with being the fundamental human struggle -- the meaning of life.

I've always been a little skeptical, however. Perhaps autonomy has been granted an outsized significance in the written word, since that written word, in order to get written, must have been created by people who fought for and won sufficient autonomy and solitude to be able to write it -- people who have, that is, spent a good bulk of their waking hours slashing like machete-wielders at the foliage of human companionship and solicitude, which I know from experience is forever threatening to encroach upon the precious few free days and nights one has in which to wring words, stories -- hence meaning -- out of the struggle.

Writers are cast in a hopeless dialectic that they can never really resolve, and wouldn't actually want to resolve anyway. The quest for autonomy, individuation -- above all, for time to oneself in which to write, along with the difficulties and obstacles that life inevitably throws in its path, furnishes them with their great artistic theme. If there was not this struggle, if they already had their free time from the start, then there would be nothing to write about during those hard-won stretches of time.

I know the perverse logic of this dialectic well. Some of the most profound aesthetic responses and creative bursts I have had come precisely when I am in my darkest despair over the thought that "I don't have any time to read or write anymore!" It was one Sunday afternoon after church two years ago when I was at a particularly low ebb, thinking that I'd barely managed to claim a single spare hour the previous week in which to glance at a book, that I was being depleted past the point of intellectual nonexistence by the bottomless demands of human sociality being made upon me by my ministerial internship -- when I picked up a paperback of D.H. Lawrence's poems in a public library's $1 book rack and read the following words: I am sick because I have given myself away./ I have given myself to the people when they came [...] So now I have lost too much and am sick[.] And so on. Which may not be absolutely terrific poetry, and might strike some as a bit overwrought and self-pitying, but in me -- finding it at that moment as I did -- it inspired one of the most sincere sympathetic vibrations with the words of any poet I've ever experienced. In my ecstasies, I wrote and underlined in the margin the single word "Ministry!" -- I'm looking at it now.

All of which is very a interesting and vivid experience to the writer, of course, but has only a fairly tenuous relevance to the rest of human life. The fact that autonomy matters so much to the makers of literature should not necessarily delude us into thinking that it matters so much to everyone. Those psychological theories that instead posit autonomy as one among several basic human needs -- and not necessarily the most important -- are probably closer to the mark.

I recognize well that nearly everyone needs some time to themselves. More than that, however, people need to exercise control over how they spend their time, which is what we really mean when we speak of autonomy. Those who tend to easily and unselfconsciously exercise control and direction over a group, when they are a part of it, will have little trouble finding autonomy in the midst of a social pack. They are therefore not particularly likely to "get it" when the quieter members of the group feel the need to check out utterly on occasion, turn off their phones, and "recharge."

Those like myself who tend (by reason of personality, family system, embedded Midwestern cultural traits, or whatever else) to efface our own desires in a group decision-making process, will have a fiercer need for long stretches of solitude as the only way to experience autonomy. I have often suspected that this is the real human difference underlying the much-publicized "extrovert"/"introvert" distinction.

Writers tend to be this latter type. I know I am. One of the chief reasons they write at all is because they are often not people who can find autonomy in the presence of others. I know in my own case, I write in part to expound wrathful or unpopular opinions that I would not feel comfortable voicing in a group setting. Life in the presence of others for us -- for me at least -- is often a process of being gradually inflated with a backlog of ideas, phrases, images, that one cannot find a way to express verbally, for fear they would bore, anger, or annoy those around you.

That is why the presence of other people must be periodically interrupted by stretches of absolute solitude, in which the backlog of phrases can be shaped into a communicable form, and finally committed to paper. Only when this inner pressure has been somewhat alleviated will one be ready to admit oneself back into human society. George Eliot, in Felix Holt, writes in this regard of the highly recognizable creative operation of one character -- "He could not sit down again, but walked backward and forward, stroking his chin, emitting his low guttural interjections under the pressure of clauses and sentences which he longed to utter aloud[.]" Gloria Anzaldúa, who will be reappearing in this post, and whose spirit hangs over it throughout, writes "I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images [...] When I don't write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill."

The length of time this operation will take probably depends on the individual. In my case, I know that for whatever reason, my backlog of ideas -- once I finally have time to myself again -- almost invariably tends to shape itself into an associative chain of thought -- featuring a mix of personal vignettes, metaphors, and half-remembered literary passages that I will have to look up again -- that is always roughly the size of one of these blog posts. The conjuring of one of these associative chains takes about a day, and the writing down of it takes about another day. (This morning, for instance, because a particularly long time had passed since my last full-length post, I had three or four of these chains in posse in my head. I entered the shower this morning with the knowledge that once I had emerged -- it's always the shower, for some reason-- I would mysteriously know which one I wanted to pursue today. I was right.)

Thus, as much as I have tried to fight it, I conclude that I really need an entire weekend to write a full and satisfying blog post. When I have been deprived of this full gestation period -- and that was true for much of the last year -- I simply cannot create them. This is when Anzaldúa's experience of "physical sickness" comes to me as well. The backlog inflates to intolerable proportions, and all that emerges is a certain quantity of poetry or half-baked thoughts, as from a steam valve. When I have really forced myself to write something under these conditions, it is always incomplete and unsatisfying, as if cut off in the middle.

Then when I am back in the presence of human civilization and of the extroverts, I am invariably asked the innocent question, "what did you do over the weekend?" An immense feeling of guilt invades me at the thought of telling the truth -- that I spent the whole two days in the presence of book and blog, and it was still not nearly enough time -- so I usually make something up that sounds more normal.

--

The vastness of this guilt is the chief thing I want to discuss today, since it seems to me that it is the second great artistic theme related to autonomy -- perhaps inseparable from the first. If the first theme was the struggle for autonomy itself, the second is the fear-- once one has gained it long enough to write -- that it was terribly wrong of one to have done so. For many, this guilt takes on a sexual, familial, and domestic cast. It stems from the suspicion that, in claiming all this me-time, one is perhaps not only being derelict in one's duties to human society as a whole (one can always at least justify one's creative exertions as in some sense serving the purpose of human ennoblement, or social justice, or some other great collective cause) -- but one is being particularly derelict in one's specific duties toward family, clan, and offspring.

Fortunately, I do not at this point have any kids -- guess I have so far taken Philip Larkin's advice on that one. Their presence would seriously complicate the already fraught moral equation I have in mind. But, kids or no kids, I still experience waves of ignominy whenever I give the honest answer to the question about how much solitude I have claimed over the weekend, especially when asked by my parents. I suppose I am suddenly acutely conscious of my failure thus far to pass on our shared genetic material and social values to the coming generation, and of the fact that I become less and less likely ever to do so the more alone-time I selfishly wrest from the world.

My parents do not put the least direct pressure on me about any of this -- the reproach comes from myself, and my projected value system, not from them. But I feel the sting of my own self-judgment, I say, whenever I contemplate my irresistible and self-chosen destiny -- that of the eternal soltero, the "confirmed bachelor" -- which I have been for as long as I was anything.

--

I should probably explain what I mean by that. For whatever reason, and for as long as I can remember, I have been basically unable to contemplate living as other people do, i.e., in some sort of romantic pairing. There's nothing wrong with others doing so, it's just intransigently at odds with the person I seem to be, and with the things I am inclined to do with my life.

The roots of this lie deep. In my childhood, when my mother explained to me that Sherlock Holmes was a bachelor, I thrilled to the word, and the concept. Likewise, I felt a personal sense of betrayal when Professor Henry Higgins opts for marriage at the end of My Fair Lady. At some point as a kid I actually signed a document as a kind of blood oath, with my sister and our friend Alex as witnesses, that informed the world I was swearing off romance forever. I had forgotten this paper existed until we were sorting through our old junk this summer and my sister unearthed it. Now it comes back to me. I recall being assured by family members at the time that the promises of the anti-romance pledge were "famous last words," on my part. I think they are more inclined to regard them now, having retrieved the paper, as a kind of talismanic curse. "If I burn this will you suddenly have a girlfriend?" said my sister.

From adolescence on, I found myself waiting for the kind of cues that other people talk about, and seem to experience -- the "crush," the flirting, and on from there. They did not come. Some element of the human programming wasn't there for me. I was like a computer that functioned entirely normally until you tried to open one application and found it had accidentally been left out at the factory.

On the exceptional occasions when I have developed romantic feelings for someone, it has tended to take a painful form that I have learned to distrust ("how fearful/ As you guess that again it begins..." writes Akhmatova (Thomas trans.), in a poem fittingly titled "Love"). Sort of as if I either needed this solitude and autonomy in its pure form, or else I would launch into the opposite extreme of infatuation.

I suppose this is related to my general struggle with literalness and all-or-nothing thinking, which has also been a theme throughout my life. The ability to hold two somewhat contrasting ideas in one's mind at once and pursue multiple priorities has always been difficult for me. "I tend, I'm afraid, to attribute to abstract ideas a life or death significance," as the narrator of John Barth's The Floating Opera declares.

The other frustrating thing about my confirmed bachelorhood when I was growing up was that the world never provided me with any vocabulary to describe or identify myself. I had no name for what I was -- apart from this antiquated, gendered term that I have adopted here with tongue in cheek, in lieu of anything better.

This lack of vocabulary was especially odd given that I was coming of age at a time when seemingly every other variety of non-normative sexuality was starting to gain increased visibility and mainstream acceptance. It seemed astonishing to me that in this vast panoply of different ways of living and relating to one another that we were discovering, there would not be more people like me who simply live their lives without romantic partnerships. But no one ever talked about that as one of the conceivable options.

On the one hand, I have felt incredibly fortunate that I showed up in the world at a time when the range of acceptable options for how to exist and relate to others was being so dramatically broadened. On the other, I felt in a strange way that precisely because one could now be openly gay, for instance -- at least in my segment of the world -- there was all the less excuse for not monogamously pairing off with someone or other as soon as possible. It seemed at times as if the choice to live on one's own, to be the soltero, to take this strange and solitary path, was almost more stigmatized now than it had been in the past. For one thing, so much of the new moral broadening had been waged in defense of sex, that a greater inclusivity toward those with the opposite difficulty perhaps slipped off the agenda.

Moreover, nowadays one could no longer retreat behind a kind of vague and implied status of sexual outsider, with the assumption that polite people did not wish to inquire into the details. (Gloria Anzaldúa recounts a little story from her young adulthood in an early chapter of Borderlands: "“‘Y cuando te casas, Gloria? Se te va a pasar el tren.’ Y yo les digo, 'Pos si me caso, no va ser con un hombre.’ Se quedan calladitas.”) Now everyone's orientation was public, and was nothing to be embarrassed about, so there was nowhere to retreat from the gaze. If under these modern and enlightened conditions one was still coy and dissimulating on the subject of one's private life -- as I have always been -- this now seems all the stranger than it did in the past. The only conclusion that people are likely to draw now is that one is uniquely defective. Actually-- scratch that. Other people aren't drawing that conclusion. One is drawing it about oneself.

All throughout my high school, college, and div school years, as the clock ticked away and that romantic impulse and subsequent pairing that everyone had told me to expect still did not materialize, I would think longingly of how much better life would be if someone said that this wasn't the only way to be. That there was this other, secret option -- hitherto undisclosed -- of doing what I actually wanted to do, that is, to be single.

If only, I would think, there were some generally accepted path to that end that I could explain to people; some term they would recognize and understand, and that would put a stop to the questions about when I planned to date someone, and who. How I envied the Catholic clergy their vows. I often wished my own denomination had a requirement of celibacy that I could point to by way of explanation. "It's not me -- it's the vocation," I could say, shrugging.

About the age of twenty-five, the conclusion finally began to dawn on me that I was going to have to do what all the other pioneers of queerness did -- what everyone else responsible for this general extension of the bounds of social norms and strictures that I was fortunate enough to inherit had done, except under far more dangerous and difficult conditions -- I was going to have to just go ahead and live the way I wanted to live, and let the world catch up, or not, as it was inclined. And how much easier it turned out to be than I expected!

--

The decisive point came as I was exiting an extremely short-lived experience of dating someone, and was faced with the task of breaking the news to my family. (This was no appealing task, given how much the family phone lines had lit up at the first reports that I was finally in the tentative early stages of a relationship. Conveying the news of the break-up, come to think of it, was a far more emotionally taxing event than the break-up itself.) However brief, these handful of dates had gone exceedingly well, and I could see unfolding ahead of me -- for the first time ever -- how this sort of thing works, how this leads by an internal logic to romance and then to marriage.

There were two destinies open before me at that moment -- the one everyone wanted for me, and the one I wanted for myself. Never before had things been painted so starkly. Never before had I actually been given a choice in the matter -- up to then my single-hood had pretty much been thrust upon me, confirmed or otherwise. At some point in this brief era, when the two vistas were still stretching ahead of me on either sides of the fork in the road, I was sprawled on my porch reading The Way of All Flesh -- written by that patron saint of all confirmed bachelors, Samuel Butler -- and knew that I was Theobald, when I read the passage about his and Christina's first carriage ride after their marriage. I too was inwardly crying out for escape. "He would drive back to Crampsford; he would complain to Mr and Mrs Allaby; he didn’t mean to have married Christina; he hadn’t married her; it was all a hideous dream; he would—But a voice kept ringing in his ears which said: 'YOU CAN’T, CAN’T, CAN’T.' 'CAN’T I?' screamed the unhappy creature to himself. 'No,' said the remorseless voice, “YOU CAN’T.  YOU ARE A MARRIED MAN." 

And it was precisely the fact that the person I was dating was a very good person, who liked me a lot, whom I liked, and whom my family would like, and the fact that this all would get the pressure taken off me from various quarters and would solve so many of my problems -- and I still just knew with an inner certainty that it was not at all what I wanted, that it was taking me off course from my life's project -- that really cinched it. Here was the proof.

This left the task of telling my parents and sister. I had tried to avoid disclosing these handful of dates to any of them in the first place, of course, out of fear that this would be the result later on, but my dad had called me up one night and asked some totally uncharacteristic questions about whether or not I was feeling lonely (translation: where is the romantic other, Josh? It's been long enough). I gathered he was on reconnaissance assignment from mom, but how they both knew to ask this question at just this moment remains a mystery to me -- some bizarre instinctual logic of genetics or the universe or the tides or lunar cycle or something. I inevitably felt compelled to quiet the parental anxieties and adduce some evidence of my own viability, so I divulged the truth -- that I actually was dating someone at the moment. And so, a couple weeks later, I ended up where I feared -- I now had to tell them all that this was no longer the case.

Doing so didn't take long, though it wasn't entirely painless either. In a series of Skype calls, I informed the members of my immediate family that I was no longer dating the person they had so briefly heard about, but assured them that the fact that I was ending this particular relationship didn't mean I was swearing off all future romantic relationships. Somehow, this functioned as a strange sort of confession that yes, in fact, that's exactly what it meant.

It was with my sister that the confession went furthest out into the open. She told me that she worried about me missing out on a part of life that had been so important to her, referring to her own marriage. I told her that people wanted different things out of life, and that I was much happier being single. "Way happier on my own, I swear." By a sort of sick joke from the cosmos, I happened to be wearing that day my activist T-shirt from NRCAT that reads, "Solitary Confinement is Torture."

By the time of our next conversation, however, my sister was fully on board. It had taken a pretty minimal degree of processing; she assimilated the idea quickly. Things, I realized, might actually not be so bad and hopeless after all. "I think I just 'came out'," I said to a friend afterward, joking. But maybe that's exactly what had happened. I started referring to myself as a "confirmed bachelor" to friends -- again, as a joke -- and saying that we needed to invent a new sexual orientation for me. But slowly I began to admit to myself that this was what I actually believed. As coming out experiences go (if that's what it was) it was an easy and gradual one.

And ever since then there has been this astonishing feeling of happiness --a feeling I'd never known before in such quantity and consistency. These last two years or so stand out to me as some of the few in my life which have been definite periods of sustained happiness. It's partly that a number of other things have gone well recently that happened to coincide with one another. I finally finished school and realized that -- unbeknownst to me -- I had been longing to do so from the start. I finally had a job and a sense that I was making some contribution to society. I had a fully formed prefrontal cortex too, now that I was over 25, and therefore had improved executive function and stick-to-it-iveness. But most of all I think what contributed to the new sensation of buoyancy was the realization that I actually was "allowed" (by whom? God? parents? the universe? society? -- myself? mostly the last) to live the way I wanted to live.

To be sure, I still encounter various frustrations and anxieties and disappointments in the ordinary course of living. But gone is the constant undercurrent of fear, the beating sense I lived with all through my teenage years and early twenties that the clock was ticking, that I was being swept along toward some fate that had been decreed for me, but which I knew I couldn't really imagine for myself, and which therefore I could only see as a kind of annihilation. I am actually able now to imagine my future -- a future with me still in it.

--

But to return to the matter at hand -- the fear may be gone, but thrumming beneath the happiness, all along, and as a logical corollary to it, is this guilt that I have mentioned.  The feeling of guilt seems the inevitable price to pay for the lifting of the sentence -- it is my penance for having escaped my just imprisonment. "If a man has been possessed by devils for long enough they will rend him as they leave him, however imperatively they may have been cast out[,]" Ernest Pontifex reflects, after finally choosing to go his own way, against his parent's wishes (again, this is in The Way of All Flesh, the soltero's Bible). How could the devils not? My happiness seemed so ill-gotten. Wasn't it, after all, fundamentally based in selfishness? Hadn't it basically come down to a choice between doing something for myself, or something for others, and I had opted in the end for me? Am I not -- as I said at the beginning -- failing in my genetic and generative purpose? Am I not letting down my kin and country?

I have found it most helpful to turn to feminist, lesbian, female, and gay writers -- and Philip Larkin -- when wrestling with this one. I feel a siblinghood with them all. Women have always been confronted more starkly than anyone with the accusation that any time they claim for themselves -- any autonomy -- is a threat to the social order, a betrayal of their family and appointed role. They have faced more and deadlier obstacles than I ever did, in most societies and epochs, to reaching that sacred grove of solitude and self-direction. Non-heterosexual people of all kinds have likewise had to contend endlessly with this accusation -- i.e., that they are choosing to place their own self-centered desires ahead of the needs of the pack, of the collective. "[S]elfishness is condemned, especially in women," writes Anzaldúa, a lesbian feminist. "[A]cting humble with members outside the family ensured that you would make no one envidioso[...] If you get above yourself, you're an evidiosa. If you don't behave like everyone else, la gente will say that you think you're better than others, que te crees grande."

And as much as liberal society now largely or officially regards these accusations as cruel and unjust, I admit that I have struggled sincerely with them in my own case. The suggestion that I was selfish -- and the fear that I might actually be -- struck home in me. After all, it is hard for any of us to escape the truth of the proposition that: (1) it is a good thing to pair off and have children, diversify the gene pool, keep the species going a little bit longer, etc. I mean, sure, right? Certainly none of us is going to say it's a bad thing. But, we ask, even if it's a good thing in general, do we in particular have to be the ones to do it -- we, the non-normative?

Ah, now that's where we are confronted with the really thorny proposition: (2) If everyone made the choice that you are making, then no one would be biologically reproducing. Hence society would collapse, the human race would come to an end, and Medicare and the German pension system would go entirely bankrupt.

Again, it's hard to argue with that one. It seems then that our way of living and of being -- as solitary writers, as non-heterosexuals, as confirmed bachelors or whatever else -- is a violation of the Kantian categorical imperative. It is not only immoral, it's positively undemocratic. How can we as individuals claim the right to do something that everyone could not do as well, except at the risk of social catastrophe? What makes us so special?

Many of us throughout recent history have -- confronted with this difficulty -- opted simply for a kind of frank immoralism, or a private élitism (I know I have). Hence you get Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes making her modest pact with the devil in exchange for the chance to live alone in a small cottage and sleep and read a few books in peace. Hence we get the individualism of an Oscar Wilde or a D.H. Lawrence. And how often have I secretly savored this option. The great thing about socialism, wrote Wilde, is that it would "relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others[.]" I relished the thought, even if I'd publicly disown it. Lawrence likewise seemed to be speaking to me directly -- he has that way, especially I guess when you are young and in desperate need of a silent rebellion-- in those lines: Don't be a good little, good little boy/being as good as you can [...] Don't long to have dear little, dear little boys /Whom you'll have to educate. In the privacy of my heart, and beneath my outward obeisances to my fiercely egalitarian and moralistic ideals, I nursed in my early twenties a kind of quiet Nietzscheanism. It was a silent protest that found enormous comfort and fellow-feeling in such words as Wilde's and Lawrence's -- indeed, it still does.

A small enough revolt of the superman, you might think, to say, I refuse to make the least effort to date anyone! Surely there are Fausts and Zarathustras in history who have waged more dangerous campaigns against morality than that. Still though, we should never pretend that the imperative to mate and reproduce is one that can be lightly turned aside by a member of our society -- indeed, it has been among those most vociferously enforced injunctions in recent history, so much so that many an Evangelical Christian when I was growing up seemed to view it as synonymous with "morality" itself (so long as it was in the context of "marriage.").

And if it really is a question of obeying this morality or accepting the just charge of immorality, we know what we will choose. If the choice comes down at last to one between happiness with guilt, on the one hand, and "sorrow without relief" (Dunbar), on the other, we choose the first, and just accept the guilt, accept the damnation, as a fair price for living as we please. Marina Tsvetaeva writes, "We shall not escape Hell, my passionate/ sisters [...] we who do not lean over cradles or/ spinning wheels at night [...] slovenly needlewomen [...] -- Gentle girls, my beloved sisters,/we shall certainly find ourselves in Hell!" (Feinstein trans.) Hers is the same revolt against domesticity as that of Lawrence, but one waged, unlike his, under the shadow of patriarchal reprisal -- an infinitely more daring revolution.

Tsvetaeva embraces the flames. She accepts the consequences. She refuses -- to borrow a phrase from Anne Sexton -- to "wear her martyrdom like a string of pearls." Women writers such as these have understood better than anyone the enormous costs imposed on those who defy domestic norms. They have accepted them anyway for the sake of the art they cannot help but produce. It is a quite different martyrdom from the domestic and maternal one Sexton is talking about -- it is martyrdom faced in the service of refusing the other kind. They have taken up their cross, in order to be happy. They have willingly born suffering as a sacrifice to joy.

I cannot claim to have ever experienced the intensity of moralistic pressures leveled against women, but I see a bit of myself in this struggle against the pull of domesticity -- the sense that one both needs to escape, and yet is daring extravagant and perhaps just punishments in doing so. Gloria Anzaldúa, whose work I've been drawn to lately (in large part because of its alignment with the themes of this post), writes in Borderlands of the struggle in these words: "Many years I have fought off your hands, Raza   father mother church   your rage at my desire to be with myself, alone." Earlier on, in the prose portion of the book, she writes: "Me entra una rabia cuando alguien – sea mi mamá, la Iglesia, la cultura de los anglos – me dice haz esto, haz eso sin considerar mis deseos." One is put in mind of Heine's "Adam the First": "I demand my freedom-rights, I find the smallest restriction/Transforms for me a paradise into Hell."

But suppose one feels -- as Tsvetaeva and Anzaldúa certainly do, Luciferian rhetoric aside --  that the punishment is not in fact just, that morality is not on the side of the divine and ecclesiastical wrath described in these poems, that their poetic voice actually bespeaks a higher morality? What if one, in other words, is not quite willing to resort to immoralism, because one does not believe that anything immoral has been done? What if one dares still to entertain the hope that one can have happiness without guilt (shocking desire!)

--

If one has reached this point, the next most obvious recourse is relativism. "You do your thing, and I'll do mine." This too has been an appealing answer to me at various times, even if it cannot really be a final position. A.E. Housman -- another confirmed bachelor -- albeit one whose condition was partially thrust upon him by the realities of late Victorian/Edwardian social life, and whose unrequited, lifelong love for a heterosexual friend is one of the most poignant episodes in literary history -- offers a particularly thrilling summation of it in one of his poems:

[...] let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs. [...]
Please yourselves, say I, and they
Need only look the other way.
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

We may love this poem, simple as its meter and language are. We may read and reread such lines with gratitude and praise. (They certainly speak to a bafflement so many of us have felt before -- why does it bother you so much that I live this way -- what on earth does it have to do with you?) But they don't really represent the sum of what we believe. Those of us who remain committed to great social causes and transformations, who long for worlds more just and compassionate, can't quite rest contented with a moral ideal of simply letting each of us "mind their own affairs." And then there is the old problem of the self-defeating character of all relativism. It can't be that every possible way of living is as good as another, unless one is to grant this same legitimacy to the judgmental "laws of God and laws of man" too, and to those who enforce them, in which case Housman in fact has nothing to condemn.

One will inevitably contradict oneself if one goes far enough down this line, which is perhaps why so many poets -- always great questers after autonomy and solitude, even as they have placed exacting moral demands on the world around them -- have had recourse to the next line of argument, which is simply to declare, with Whitman, that one is happy to contradict oneself.

I too have tried this one on for size. A thrill went through me (as it did when I read Housman, as it did when I read Tsvetaeva and Lawrence and Anzaldúa) when I first encountered those lines of Hugh MacDiarmid that he chose for his tombstone -- the ones that condemn "the cursed conceit o' bein' richt/ That damns the vast majority o' men."

But, entertaining and inwardly liberating as it may be to utter a contradiction, one cannot actually gain intellectual satisfaction from it. Indeed, one cannot actually believe in one, regardless of how much one protests one does, since contradictions are in truth unthinkable.

There is always still another option -- one that Philip Larkin tries out (another lifelong bachelor, confirmed or otherwise) -- which is to suggest that the choice to live the domestic life is ultimately just as selfish as the choice to live alone. As Larkin writes in "Self's the Man," a poem about a married friend named "Arnold" that sardonically verges on doggerel:

[...] To compare [Arnold's] life and mine
Makes me feel a swine:
Oh, no one can deny
That Arnold is less selfish than I.

But wait, not so fast:
Is there such a contrast?
He was out for his own ends
Not just pleasing his friends;

And if it was such a mistake,
He still did it for his own sake,
Playing his own game.
So he and I are the same,
Only I'm a better hand
At knowing what I can stand!

This approach too, like the others, has its satisfactions, particularly when one is feeling wounded and venomous, and would relish the chance to turn the tables on one's accusers -- as perhaps I was when I first read this verse. But as soon as we do so, we are back in the same pickle of relativism in which we were just stewing above. We have deprived ourselves, in our very act of self-defense, of any ability to regard ourselves as having been unjustly treated. If every act is as selfish as every other, we can no longer contest the judgment of our neighbors as unfair. Besides, however much most of us may be "out for [our] own ends," one still hasn't solved the question of whether some of the ends ultimately serve the rest of the species better than others.

--

This was as far as I was able to get, well into div school and my early twenties. I couldn't see a way out of it. I guessed I was going to have to be an immoraliste after all, or just be miserable. Worst of all was the fact that the larger culture didn't seem to view these as pressing questions or concerns -- at least not in the liberal circles I frequented. Most people in these settings had already long since figured out that of course it was fine for everyone to do their own thing in their private lives, so long as they weren't hurting anyone, and that this did not mean that it was also okay to be a selfish asshole or Hitler or something.

But what about those of us for whom "abstract ideas [...] have a life or death significance"? What about those who are cursed with literalness, with the all or nothing mentality? How are we to think our way out of this one? The world furnished me with no handholds. Moreover, it was seen as impolite in the extreme to raise these questions at all. It did not help that I seemed to be surrounded by people -- like one of my best friends from div school -- who were struggling with much the same question themselves, or who had arrived at an answer I could not accept, since it would doom me to marriage, or who had never posed it in the first place -- never with anyone who had thought all the way through to the end of it and come out the other side with a position I could stand. I was, like Ernest Pontifex, confronted by a world of "Towneleys," who were born knowing how to be non-literal and to entertain a diversity of ideas. I was in a world of foxes, to use Isaiah Berlin's famous terminology, and I was most decidedly a hedgehog.

Salvation came from an unlikely quarter. I was reading in an indifferent way a Times Literary Supplement article about Max Weber, of all people. Not the sort of activity that one is ordinarily expecting will lead to profound and lasting resolutions of one's inner psycho-sexual turmoil. Yet there I found the following words: "Weber was never properly a 'nationalist'. Rather, his was a 'multicultural' world, governed by conflicts over values, but where resolution was to be found neither in relativism nor resignation, but rather in a principled 'objective' commitment to taking the measure of what we conventionally render as value pluralism."

Wait a minute! Stop the presses! I had to read and re-read that one. So -- there is some intellectual position that is not relativism, but that also is not monism? There is some secret option nobody told me about, between my absolutist thinking and inherent tendency toward monomania, on the one hand, and a total abyss on the other of relativism and skepticism, in which there were no moral values at all?

Having tracked down the exact TLS quotation, I am somewhat astonished that this was the thing that had such an impact on me. But it did. I had heard of value pluralism before this article, I suppose, but had never before quite grasped what it had to do with my plight. And, of course, this great insight, this lifeline, this idea that is going to finally resolve my inner conflicts, is dashed off by the author as if it were something that everyone already knew. "What we conventionally render as..."

Perhaps everyone did know it. Perhaps, as Towneleys, they came into the world knowing it. But I had to find it for myself through a long conscious process. Like Ernest Pontifex, I recognize that "to make Towneleys possible there must be hewers of wood and drawers of water [...] through whom conscious knowledge must pass before it can reach those who can apply it gracefully and instinctively as the Towneleys can. I am a hewer of wood, but if I accept the position frankly and do not set up to be a Towneley, it does not matter.”

--

I was talking to my div school friend one night -- the one who, as I mentioned, is struggling with quite different but strangely analogous questions of sexuality, identity, and the obligations he owes to his family and community. We were giving yet another airing to the old argument about whether it is wrong to avoid marriage and childrearing. My friend was particularly stuck on a point his father had made -- namely, that it was valuable to carry on the family line, because one is thereby contributing to human genetic diversity. (Which I suppose is true, but probably low on my list of the things that are valuable about having kids that I sometimes worry about missing out on). My ecstatic experience over the Weber article came back to me in this moment.

"You don't have to deny that it's valuable to have kids -- for the gene pool or whatever other reason," I said to my friend. "There's a vast number of things that are valuable in the world. The thing is that none of us is going to be able to do all of them. So we have to start making some choices between the different values. To choose some of them over the others doesn't mean we are saying the other ones are illegitimate. In fact, it's all the better that other people are pursuing the other values, so that they get realized in the world. Those values just aren't a part of the distinct contribution that you are going to make, with your one life. And it's not like the different values are in conflict with one another either. To choose one while saying that another is also good is not a contradiction. It's also not the same thing as relativism. We're saying that there are multiple values in the world -- too many for every one of us to realize them all fully in our limited time on this planet. But that doesn't mean that everything has value, or that there are no values. It's not relativism. It's value pluralism."

I was trying to convince myself as much as I was him, and it was working on both counts. To my delight, it seemed that this incredibly simple idea -- the one that had apparently been old hat for so long to our TLS writer -- was revelatory to my friend as well. "Wait a minute, say that again," he said, and I did. Then: "So... it's like a menu at a restaurant. And you can only pick one item or a couple. But it doesn't mean all the ones that you didn't pick are bad. Just that you can't have them all."

"Exactly!" I said. "And, it also doesn't mean that there isn't anything you could select that would be a bad choice. You can still say that 'there are plenty of good options on the menu,' without saying that it makes just as much sense as anything else to order something with horseradish." I didn't say exactly that, of course, but that was the gist.

This is still more or less the place where I land. At some point in my life, I faced a choice as to whether the contribution I had to make to humanity, my family, and the world was one of adding to our number through marriage and childrearing, or whether it was something quite different. And -- Kant be damned -- just because I chose one of the two options over the other doesn't mean that I'm saying it would be right for everyone, or that I am better than others. It simply means it was the right one for me, given the distinct capacities, personality, and calling I seem to bring to the world.

It is nice, of course, to think that it is possible to do it all. And for others, it may be. I am aware that many writers -- the vast majority, in fact -- have accomplished their work while also having various romantic relationships and partnerships throughout their life, and maybe even raising children. But I know what is possible for me. I know the degree of solitude I need, and seem to have attained a balance of it at this point, a little past my first quarter-century of life, that is conducive to happiness.

--

"Now I add a third [lesson], now that I'm 61," said Sandra Cisneros in a recent interview on NPR, "and that is learn how to be alone. It's OK to be by yourself. You do not have to be a unit. You do not have to be a father or a mother. And sometimes it's impossible to be that as an artist 'cause you can hardly make enough money to take care of you. We become artists because we're lonely. Then we have to be alone to create the art. And then finally, at my stage of my life, I like being alone and prefer my own company."

I was co-teaching a health and sexuality course one time at church, as part of a previous job, and one of the students asked me the question: "Is it okay for me to not want to be in a relationship with anyone -- like, ever?" I had recently heard Cisneros' interview on the radio, so the next session, I brought in these words and read them aloud.

I suppose I could be accused of promoting the confirmed bachelor agenda -- and this too right on the heels of my historical critical Bible study class that focused on everything that probably didn't actually happen in the book as written. But really I just wanted to share some words that would have helped me a lot, I think, if I had heard them as a teenager. Lord knows I had tussled with the same question as this student.

At least, I think I would have appreciated hearing that interview. But perhaps I wouldn't have really understood it, or believed her. Perhaps I would have regarded it as an effort at self-consolation. I had to work through my own journey to arrive at Cisneros' conclusion. It is okay to be by myself.

--

But now the pressure is on, I suppose, to make this extra time and solitude I have bought for myself count. If I really mean it that I have chosen it because I have some other great work for humanity to perform, that is not having kids of my own, but that will equally serve the coming generation, I'd better get on it. I'm not sure that even a very well-turned series of blog posts will be quite enough to meet the standard.

To choose this path is a daunting thing. It is, in a sense, to put one's name in the running for sainthood. It is an implicit promise that one is going to deliver on great works of art, or great sacrifices for social justice. It is to claim a sort of monastic vocation, except in the service -- in my case -- not of God, but of one's fellow human beings. It is to be, like Louise Michel, a "Red Virgin." Married to the revolution. Bride of the struggle.

That's what I've signed myself up for. Now that everyone knows it, there is no going back. Now that everyone is on board, I have no excuse. Let's make something of this dear-bought solitude. Shall we?




--

Postscript, added July, 2021: 

 Everyone thinks I have a secret. Everyone thinks I have something to hide. A colleague tells me the other day: "I just noticed; you never tell me anything about your personal life. You're a tough nut to crack." Today, he returns to the theme. "You're so private. You keep such a rigid separation between your work life and social life." 

But there is no secret; or if secret there is, the secret is that there is no secret. I'm not hiding anything. There's nothing to hide. If a party is thrown and I don't need a plus-one; it's not because I have a significant other hidden away somewhere whom I've be afraid to show the world. If someone asks me if I'm dating someone, I'll tell them the truth: No.

A friend tells me there's nothing unusual about all this. I don't need to justify it to anyone. But the fact that people feel the need to inquire into why I'm not dating someone is proof enough that, in the eyes of our society, simply not dating anyone, and not aspiring to date anyone, is still not seen as a fact that can be accepted at face value. It's seen as obscuring something. It needs an explanation. It needs a label. 

And a label in widespread use is precisely what I've always lacked. In high school and college, my usual dodge, when asked, "do you have a girlfriend," was "No, not yet," as if I just hadn't found time to get around to it. But of course, I never really intended to get around to it; or perhaps, with the tragic logic of all procrastinators, I hoped that somehow I would undergo some profound metamorphosis at a larger stage—if it could be delayed enough—that would somehow turn me into the sort of person who would want to. 

It never happened. Oh, that's not to say there was never a single human crush along the way. I count two. Nor that there was never a date. I count five. But this makes it even worse. I'm denied even the few labels that we have: asexual, aromantic. I forfeited their use by failing to be absolutely lacking in the promptings of the flesh. 

But no. The authorities tell me that the terms are available for wider use than that. They refer to a spectrum, after all. And a spectrum is broad enough to include me. And if you go online, there are endless resources telling me I should embrace these new self-definitions. There are aro flags to hang on the wall. Aro t-shirts. Aro coffee mugs. So maybe I should just go for it. Come out. Be aromantic. 

So next time this colleague brought up his question about my personal life, I tried it out on him. "I'm somewhere on the aromantic/asexual sprectrum" I told him, hoping that would satisfy him. And, as expected, he shifted into a mode of reassurance. "I hope you don't feel your identity is being persecuted and erased." Now that I had named my condition, he had a ready-made vocabulary for it. 

I felt temporarily pleased. I finally had a logo. I had been claimed. But deep in my gut too, a wound had opened up. It felt somehow like a compromise with myself. I had told a white lie. I had put myself into a box that didn't entirely fit, just because I accepted the false premise that I needed a box to start with. I am reminded of Ivan Illich's words, in his Medical Nemesis: 

"Any society, to be stable, needs certified deviance. People who look strange or who behave oddly are subversive until their common traits have been formally named and their startling behavior slotted into a recognizable pigeonhole. By being assigned a name and a role, eerie, upsetting freaks are tamed, becoming predictable exceptions who can be pampered, avoided, repressed, or expelled [....]

"By naming the spirit that underlies deviance, authority places the deviant under the control of language and custom and turns him from a threat into a support of the social system." 

This is the sense in which I felt I'd sold out. By accepting a label, I had become a cognizable exception, and I was now among those to be "pampered." Which felt good, for a moment. But in the process, I had also accepted a name for myself that is not one I had chosen. That is one society had forced me to adopt. And so I felt at last that I should not have divulged my answer to his question. I should not have accepted the premise that there was anything about my choices to be explained. 

Instead, I should embrace Yeats's principle that one should be secret and exult. I agree with D.H. Lawrence: "Nakedly to be alone, unseen/ is better than anything else in the world."