THE SHADOW OF SOLITUDE

THE SHADOW OF SOLITUDE: 

On Love and the Fear of Ourselves

by an 

Observer of the Heart

I do not know how many of you will agree with me—and indeed, I rather hope some will not, for disagreement is the salt of thought—but it has often seemed to me that many of our most fervent affections are less the product of courage than of a peculiar sort of cowardice. I mean this not in the vulgar sense, as when one shrinks from battle or refuses an honest day’s work, but rather in that subtler and more disturbing sense: the fear we have, not of the world, but of ourselves.

We speak of love as though it were a noble thing—and so it is, in its truest and most unveiled form. But how often is that form to be found in the common alleys of human intercourse? More often, I think, we stumble not into love as an act of boldness, but as a kind of evasion. We seek the other not to know them, but to forget ourselves. We plunge into relationship as a man might plunge into a crowd—not to be seen more clearly, but to be hidden. To lose oneself in another, we say. And what a telling phrase that is! For who loses what he values?

There is, deep in the soul of man, a kind of ache—not the ache of absence, but of presence; the weight of our own consciousness, the echoing stillness within that tells us we are terribly alone, and even more terribly, that we are ourselves. And in the face of this, many seek love as one might seek a warm fire in the cold of night—not out of passion, but from chill. We go to another not to share the cup of being, but to dilute it—to dissolve our own unbearable solitude into the broader sea of the Other.

Do not mistake me. I do not mean that such love is false or evil. I only mean it is infantile, not in the sense of being unworthy, but in the sense of being young—tender, uncertain, driven by need more than by gift. It is like the love of a child for its mother: fierce, possessive, and entirely wrapped in the fear of being left alone. There is, of course, nothing wrong with the child; but we do not expect him to remain so forever.

Real love—the love that gives rather than grasps, that knows the Other not as a shelter from self but as a self in their own right—is something altogether rarer, and infinitely more costly. It begins, I think, when a man has stood long enough in the silent room of his own soul, and found that the shadows do not bite, and that the echo he feared was only the sound of his own being returning to him in truth. Only then can he offer himself, not as a fugitive escaping inward solitude, but as a pilgrim bearing inward treasure.

But most of us, I suspect, do not begin there. We begin in fear. We love because we are lonely, and we are lonely because we are afraid. We long to melt, to merge, to be rid of the burden of being singular. We imagine ourselves as drops of ink dissolving into the vast and quiet ocean, hoping never again to see the boundaries of our own shape.

And yet, how strange—how tragic, even—that in seeking to be rid of ourselves, we forfeit the very gift we were meant to give. For what is love, if not the offering of a self—whole, distinct, known—to another who is likewise whole and known? The paradox is this: that only the man who is not afraid of his own solitude is capable of true union. He who flees the self will never find the other. He will only lose both.

So perhaps the first act of love is not to reach outward, but to turn inward and befriend the ghost within. To say to the solitary soul, “I see you. I will not run.” And having made peace with that inward solitude, we may then turn to another—not to escape, but to share. Not as ink vanishing into water, but as flame meeting flame, each light burning clearer for the presence of the other.