[PRAISE FOR

the loners' manifesto

`A witty essay about things best done on your own.... A founding manifesto
for an organization of self-contained people.... A clever and spirited
defense."

Kirkus Reviews

"This brilliant book, filled with wonderful asides and insights, has convinced
me that there is something terribly wrong with calling a loner a deviant.
Terrific, learned, and ferocious, Pary of One brings all kinds of wonderful
ideas to mind, so don't be put off if you happen not to be a loner. I am not,
and I learned an enormous amount."

-JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSO\, author of The Nine Emotional Lives

of Cats

`Anneli Rufus is a stylist of the first order, a lyrical and evocative writer with
a big heart and keen intellect who turns to gold any topic she touches. And
now with her latest book, Party of One, Rufus has hit upon the perfect
subject to match her considerable talents. The result is an original,
provocative, and passionately written plea on behalf of all those who want to
be left alone. Part' of One is muckraking of a different kind, exposing the
tyranny of the mob while delving deep into the human psyche."

-GA RN, RIVLIN, author of The Plot to Get Bill Gates

"[Anneli Rufus'] important, ... wholly unprecedented new book, Party of

One: The Loners' Manifesto, regularly implores "the mob" not to stigmatize
loners those, like her, who prefer to leave the phone off the hook and let the
machine answer ... it's a fresh, persuasive argument ... she makes a consistent
case.... Part' of One belongs on that short shelf of books that revise how we
think about human behavior."

-David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

[PRAISE FOR]

arlr:lc II r..ufus

previous work
"Unceasing delight."

-Dallas Morning News

"A magnificent if eccentric success."

-Los Angeles Times

"Charmingly grotesque."

-Salon

"Rufus's splendid storytelling takes readers on a tour not soon forgotten."

-Publishers Weekly
party one
party of one
THE LONERS MANIFESTO
anneli rufus
To Fuzzy, for being, To Matthew, for believing, To DM, a friend from 1965
and beyond To EK, a friend from 1982 and beyond
contents
• introduction • xiii

1. • village people • 1

I COMMUNITY

Cutting the traces

2. • listen to us • 21

I POPULAR CULTURE

The secret message

3. • do you feel lucky? • 42

I FILM

We can be heroes

4. • marlboro country • 53

I ADVERTISING

Have it your way

i have to go now 66

FRIENDSHIP

Running on empty

6. • just catch me • 76

I LOVE & SEX

Making it

7. • power surge • 95

I TECHNOLOGY

Turned on

8. • the diving bell • 114

ART

Courting the spark

9. • singular glamour • 123

LITERATURE

I am the Steppenwolf

10. • jesus, mary, and jennifer lopez • 141

I RELIGION

Fleeing the flock

11. • new disorder • 171

I SANITY

Who's crazy now

12. • the 1-word • 186

I CRIME

Our name in vain

13. • bizarre as i wanna be • 215

I ECCENTRICITY

Acting up

14. • the sleeve said • 225

I CLOTHES

Putting them on

15. • don't go there • 233

I ENVIRONMENT

Welcome to lonerland

16. • absolutely, totally alone • 241

I SOLO ADVENTURERS

Too far to call

17. • smiling bandits • 254

I CHILDHOOD

Little League kills

• afterword • 269

• endnotes • 273

• bibliography • 283
introduction

VENT 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 if 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 its hugeness a shared frisson. A sense of collective self. A jubilation in
assembly, in the very fact 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 paraphrase 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 doesn't understand.

Someone says to you, "Let's have lunch." You clench. Your sinews leap
within 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 leaning over the rail, a tattoo on his back of a baby-faced
devil above the words Born Horny. I don't 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 aboutyou. 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 't'aken":

'two 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.

They take offense. Feel hurt. Get angry. 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-up. Standoffish. Aloof Afraid. Lacking in social skills.

Bizarre. Unable to connect. Incapable of love. Freaks. Geeks. Sad. Lonely
Selfish. Secretive. Ungrateful. Unfriendly. Serial killers.

THEY BRH)!.11 WHIN we turn down invitations. They know we are

making up excuses, but they can't 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 or invisible. With the blithe
assurance of a majority, the mob nods knowingly 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 .357
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 guy who will go to great
lengths to avoid unnecessary human contact. Is that so wrong? No, it's not.
Human beings are nasty, disgusting, germ-infested vermin.

The 1-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 within the herd. Loners live among the
mob, so the mob mistakes us for its own, presuming and assuming. When
the mob gets too close, the truth is revealed. Running or walking away,
chased or free, any which way, we tell the mob in effect I don't 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 ones who know how to entertain ourselves. How to learn without
taking a class. How to contemplate 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 unprecedented. An
advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous
like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints,
esoteric like the cabalists. Loners, by virtue 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 ones 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. These books talk of "stealing away," of "retreats" and of "seeking
sanctuary." They pose solitude as novelty and a desperate act: the work of
thieves 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. This is not one of
those books.

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? A tiny, tightly rolled
scroll 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, 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. As a journalist, I have covered hundreds of subjects, reported on
thousands of people, ways of life, cultures, subcultures, cults, habits,
hobbies, ripples, rites, beginnings, ends. Towns where on certain days every
year, snakes deluge the streets, then slither off at dusk. Towns whose most
famous incidents are massacres. Towns whose churches are built under the
surface of the earth, whose hotels are carved out of ice, whose residents are
waiting for spacecraft to land. Towns burned to the ground and towns
drowned. And yet, in all this, never did I hear the voices or see phalanxes of
what is as surely my own kind as rock 'n' roll fans or Jews or people from
Los Angeles. No one had linked us, threaded us like beads on one strand.
Someone should. Because we have a point. We form a chorus, but the oddest
chorus in the world, a willful antichorus. In saying entirely different things,
usually not saying them aloud to anyone at all, we are saying a lot.

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 observationis 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 legislation, unless you count tax breaks for
married couples with kids and higher taxes for the self-employed. It mostly
shows itselfsurprise, 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 presumed dull or
embarrassing. Or abstruse, like quantum physics. A gauzy 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 possibly 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

knowyou're there. Pick up the phone.

The bias shows itself in nosy questions. What are you doing in there? Hurt
feelings. Why areyou avoiding me? Catcalls. You're weird.

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 can't 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 color. This science is comforting insofar as it frees our parents from
feeling that having loners as children is their "fault," that they "did
something" to "cause" this.

Was I born this way? Or am I a loner because I am an only child? My friend

Elaine is one of seven children, and she is the most lonerish loner I have ever
met. Stephen Zanichkowsky is a loner. His memoir, Fourteen, is about
growing up with thirteen siblings.

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.

AT EIGHT YEARS old I was appalled at Bluebirds meetings where the girls
were idiots who did not know that France was next to Germany or how to
spell Thanksgiving on the cards we made from paper bags.

Halfway through every Bluebirds meeting, I longed to go home. It was not

my house I missed so much, not the orange sofa with its squeaky plastic
cover or the thick pong from my grandfather's cigars. Rather, I wanted
distance from the jabber and the dullness, the blue-skirted girls arguing over
whose mother was the prettiest. They ganged up, they loved games, they
were easily bored. They yawned when we went to the tide pools. They
shouted that the sea anemones looked like barf. I would rather be anywhere
than with them, I thought, anywhere, even in prison or a hardware store.
I knew, even then, that I could not get away. My mother murmured with the
troop leader. They had their heads together. Troubled ... antisocial ...
hopeless at games, does not seem to want to win. My mother, in a sort of
panic, paid my dues a whole year in advance. I could not quit. The message
was, I must learn to like Bluebirds, before it was too late.

How could I know, then, 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 achievementnot
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 though 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 TV. In algebra classes and cinemas. Since
the beginning, 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 forebears. Protoloners.

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. Austrianborn philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who lived as a hermit. Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented TV
single-handedly. Silent Spring author Rachel Carson. Brian Epstein. James
Michener. Alec Guinness. Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1932: "Although I
am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the
invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps
me from feeling isolated." The same Einstein who observed wryly, "To
punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself."

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 threefourths of the total. The difference between the two, he said,
lies in the way they perceive and interpret information.

Extraverts concern 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 immaterial
details. Impressions and opinions. He feels his own deduction to be cor-
rect,Jung wrote in 1921, yet the introvert "is not in 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 understood,
he is credulously liable to overestimate. Ambitious women have only to
understand how advantage may be taken 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 hackers, loner
programmers, loner inventors? Surely they rely on facts. My father was an
engineer without a subjective bone in his body. Yet he was a loner all his
life. He taped handmade signs on the door to his den, a door he always kept
shut. Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Without Knocking. Confucius Say:
Get the @#! Out of Here.

LONERS ARE ALL types, subjective and objective thinkers, religious and
atheist, soldiers and screenwriters and supermodels. We are the group that is
never a group, that sneers at groups. In number theory, we might be
described as "the set of units that are 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 which loners chorus, Do not call us on the phone! Leave,
leave, leave us alone! We cannot lend each other our support. It goes against
our nature--in body, at least, if not in mind.

America trembles in fear of loners, yet Charles Manson is a social butterfly.

The mob needs loners. It might never know how much. For its own sake, for
entertainment and advancement, it needs what we have. What we do and
make in our worlds hidden within the world.

WHEN PARENTS ON TV shows punished their kids by ordering them to

go to their rooms, I was confused. I loved my room. Being there behind a
locked door was a treat. To me a punishment was being ordered to play
Yahtzee with my cousin Louis. I puzzled over why solitary confinement was
considered the worst punishment in jails.

School startled me. Crowds made it hard to think, and teachers rebuked me
for not liking to share. The oddest thing was that my classmates never
minded how boring they were, nor minded each other's incessant attention.
They sat whispering wetly into one another's ears, eagerly awaiting recess
when they could ram each other or throw balls to one another, sharing their
dullness like a secret handshake. There was one wild boy whom the teacher
exiled to a remote desk in the corner. He sat, writhing, desperate to return. I
wished that desk was mine.

My father was a loner, disdaining everyone but Jacques Cousteau and the
men on Wild Kingdom. My mother was not a loner by nature but had come
to act like one, having been fat as a girl and having faced cruel taunts in an
era when fat kids were fair game. She had learned to keep away from what
might hurt. Imagining that I was taking after them, my parents pictured me
grown up, mad in a garret, hair a mess, listening to Radio Free Europe on a
fold-up chair.

This is why Mom enrolled me in Bluebirds. Two or three of the other girls
combined, as I saw it, barely amounted to a complete person. They needed
each other because they were not whole. This is how I learned to feel
superior.

The creed we chanted at each meeting called us "sisters," to whom each of

us was pledged to "cleave while faggots are brought from the forest." Not
that I cared all that much whether they liked me. But the reasons they chose
for disliking me: such as the way I worked at projects, gluing every last
sugar cube and pebble into place when making dioramas of castles and the
bottom of the sea, whittling Popsicle sticks into dragonfly wings, mixing red
and white into hot pink long after everyone else had quit and left the paints
uncapped.

Not that I was incapable of friendship. Don't be shy, the teachers coaxed. I
was not shy, only extremely choosy. And Denise shone like a diamond. If
you had asked me to define paradise, I would have said a desert island which
Denise could visit, on a boat.

But when she did the other thing, the social thing, throwing her head back in
a crowd and laughing, she looked like a stranger to me. Afterwards all she
could talk about was people. Jeff said Patti had a hickey when they went to
Tim's with Julie. It was jealousy, but more, a suspicion that she was right and
I was wrong, that she was well and I was sick, a premonition that the world
would not dole out its rewards equally to both of us.

In high school I wanted to be a foreign-exchange student. After several

interviews and essays, the judges declared me an ideal candidate. Clever but
curious, polite, brave in strange places. Then they turned me down. I was not
social enough, they said. So they chose a girl who belonged to seven clubs
and tutored small children after school.

This is how I learned to feel inferior.

For years and years.

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 guards, and even land mines. Being one's
own friend-sometimes one's only friend-is not always easy. Drawing
validation and fun from within is all well and good, but hard when we see
nonloners scooping up all the prizes. My father used to say It's not whatyou
know, it's who you know, and I did not want to believe him. He said it
ironically, wistfully, 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. In his career and mine and
most, of course it's true. The whole world is a personality cult.

WHICH IS WHY loners must remember how it felt to glue those sugar
cubes. 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 kaleidoscopes. Happy, sad. Shy, laughing at
danger. Sprinting, languid. Contemplative, reckless. Cool, uncool.

But here. There. Having millions of tiny parties everywhere.

1.
village people
[COMMUNITY]
Groupthink was a survival tactic when sieges and plagues threatened the
futures of clans and cultures. Now its an evolutionary remnant that we are
free to discard.

-\IAGINE YOU'RE A loner whose ideal home would be a cot-tage on the

beach, miles from the nearest neighbor. And your ideal day would be one in
which you slept from noon to dinnertime, worked half the night, then split
the rest between raising pigeons and walking-alone, of course on the beach.

In some places and eras, you could get away with it. Not most. In most you
would be loathed, surveilled, suspected of perversion, called a witch, hauled
out, spat at, set afire -or something like that. With luck you might only be
laughed at, mercilessly, all your life.

Time, place, and culture have crushed countless loners. Fancy having been
born in an Anasazi cliff dwelling, cheek by jowl with kin and neighbors in a
small confined space cut off from solitude by a long sheer drop. Or as a
woman in a wealthy Ming Dynasty household, consigned to see only
relatives for years on end, and only in the house and courtyard. Villages with
thin-walled huts side by side, face to face, surrounded by wildernesses too
fearsome to assail alone. Tenements. Communes. Call it anthropology or
sociology but, for most loners, call it hell.

It makes sense that when a group is struggling to survive, a loner is a

liability. We are the acid that dissolves the glue that bonds communities. We
are the loose thread in the weave, for all intents and purposes the poison in
the pot. From the dawn of civilization onward, interdependence has been the
best weapon. Concordance fuels work, faith, folkways, and the future and, as
countless loners have been chagrined to realize, identity. Cooperation, by the
old rules, guards against starvation-you chop trees with which I build a boat
in which he catches fish which she hawks and they buy. Loners who step out
of the loop exempt themselves from mercy. It is the cooperative ant that
survives famines, not the selfish loner grasshopper. Whoever isn't with us is
against us is the old shout. That puts loners right down there with pillagers
and rapists. When extinction looms, loners who shun the family way might
as well be murderers, too. Each time, place, and culture makes its own rules
for how to be a model citizen. Being a loner usually means smashing all
those rules, simply by breathing.

But just as Homo sapiens no longer need prehensile toes, we no longer all
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.
The world has changed since barns needed raising. Our military forces are
already so populous that you do not have to join the army in order to keep
your hometown safe. Unless you want to. 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's, will not hold back the human race.

THE VERY NOTION of the self as a separate entity, unique from others, is
a luxury and a fairly newfangled one at that. The psychologist Anthony Storr
posits that the notion of the self emerges only when populations begin to feel
solidly secure about their future as a whole. As individuals acquire more free
time, they are allowed more choice about how to spend that time and with
whom, if anyone, to spend it. These exponentially expanding options make
for a loosening of traditional relationships. Less is demanded of the
traditional bonds between kinfolk, between neighbors, between the flock and
its clergy and its deities. It is exactly this-the dissolution of old-style
communality and the rise of what Margaret Mead called "the fragmented life
of the city"--that social critics blame for soaring rates of crime, suicide,
depression, and divorce.

In his exhaustive study of villages around the world, journalist Richard

Critchfield employing the observer-participant method adopted by many
anthropologists voiced a yearning to "recapture" the dynamic of "mutual
help that so typifies village life" but which, in the late twentieth century,
seemed obsolete. Wistfully, Critchfield conceded that to do so "would
demand an unacceptable return to subsistence agriculture."
But to applaud that lost era of barn raisings and harvest homes, to insist that
it takes a village, is to disparage loners. The tight weave of traditions that
makes a comfortable hammock for some just as surely makes a noose that
strangles others. Loosening the stranglehold and throwing away the noose is,
for loners, the beginning of culture rather than the end of it. If the notion of
the self is a product of human confidence and security, of free time and free
choice, then it is nothing less than a product of civilization. Individualism is
a reward, like the printed word and manicures, for millennia well-spent. By
this logic, those who draw their sense of identity from within from the self,
as loners do rather than from a group and its folkways, are basking in the
glory of advanced civilization. By this logic, loners are also carrying that
momentum forward. And by this logic, group behavior is a bit retrograde, a
bit primitive.

NOTHING CAN STOP loners from being born, wherever and whenever.
But living happily as a loner, fulfilling one's destiny as a loner, is another
story. Working in Africa for more than thirty years, Polish Journalist Ryszard
Kapuscinski recognized that its geography renders close communities a
virtual necessity: "The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the
environment and the human being, [and] the immensity of African space,"
he writes.

A Ghanaian colleague explained to Kapuscinski how, among his own tribe,

the Ashanti, "time spent communally is highly valued.... It is important to
live together, or near one another: there are many tasks which can be
accomplished only collective ly-otherwise, there is no chance of surviving."
The traditional Ashanti manner of greeting friends and strangers alike,
Kapuscinski observes, is a complex ritual that celebrates interdependence.
"It is essential to exhibit from the very beginning," he writes, "from the very
first second, enormous, primal joy and geniality." Hands are extended with
"a large, vigorous gesture" so that "these extremities, bursting with
tremendous energy, now meet halfway ... with a terrifying impact of
collision." All the while, the owners of the hands "share a prolonged cascade
of loud laughter. It is meant to signify that each is happy to be meeting and
warmly disposed to the other." This segues into a series of sincere how-are-
yous. On a visit to Uganda, Kapuscinski observed night falling so rapidly
and so unrelievedly that in the space of "one instant ... you can see nothing,
as if somebody has pulled a sack over your head" and, he notes, "darkness
separates people, and thereby intensifies all the more their desire to be
together, in a group, in a community.... Being alone? That's misfortune,
perdition!" He received that message wherever he traveled on the continent.
In Nigeria, for instance, "let's say that you have found a small room
somewhere, and you want to shut the door to work. Shut the door? This is
unthinkable. We all live together in a family, in a group children, adults, old
people; we are never apart.... Shut yourself alone in a room, in such a way
that no one can enter? Ha! Ha! Ha! This is impossible!"

My friend Eve, who studied music in Ghana as a Fulbright scholar, is a

loner.

"It's considered a sickness," she says. "I found it excruciating to be me in

West Africa.

"One of the hardest parts about being a loner in a foreign culture is

vulnerability. This is worse in Africa, where as a white person I couldn't
possibly hide because of my color. I felt traumatized just walking out the
front door and down to the corner market, bracing myself against all the
gawking and laughter and shouts of `white person' and people asking for
money. Part of being a loner is not wanting to stand out, right?

"And what makes it even worse," Eve reflects, is that Ghana lacked any
"infrastructure to maintain your anonymity. You have to interact socially in
order to get anything done at all, because there are no impersonal systems
and institutions to handle things-there are only people."

Since she was there to film traditional musicians, "much of the high drama
came from finding myself way out in some middle-of-nowhere village with
a gang of complete strangers in some attempt at ethnographic field
recording, with an expensive video camera and suddenly losing my nerve. I
pissed a lot of people off because I'd start off all gung-ho, and then realize I
was way out of my league and defenseless, in the event they decided to jump
me and steal everything I had. So it would be wonderful for a while, on a
new adventure to some remote place, but then my courage would start to
fail. Then I'd grab the next taxi back down the road in the opposite direction,
followed by a horde of very angry Ghanaians whose plans I'd just ruined."
She hoped to find a bit of comfort among the fellow Fulbrighters with whom
she shared an apartment compound, "but as usual I just couldn't make any of
those relationships `stick,' either. Most of them traveled as couples or even
fami lies, and the ones who didn't quickly found a safety net of Ghanaian
connections. One by one they all left the compound. I can still hear the
sound of that heavy, rusty, iron gate creaking in the middle of the night. At
that point, I would even have welcomed the company of the angry African-
American roommate who despised me for being there in the first place and
moved out soon after he arrived.

"The Ghanaians seem to regard it as a form of perversion if a person has no

friends, lives alone, and goes around by themselves. It was like you were a
bad person, an outcast-possessed. There was no such thing as an individual
in our Western sense, a person who existed outside of any social group-i.e., a
loner except maybe shamans, the sick, and the insane."

She discontinued her scholarship, gave up on a dream, and flew home early.

IN OTHER CULTURES she would have suffered less. Her loner nature
would not have become an issue. Prague-based travel writer Tim Nollen
explains that in the Czech Republic, "interaction with strangers--in shops, on
the metro are generally kept to impersonal comments and curt replies, if
anything at all." Czechs "don't put too much effort into getting to know one
another," he observes. Compared even to most other Europeans, they "have a
strong sense of privacy," he declares, and "tend to stay home."

By at least partial way of explanation, Nollen cites those long Cold War
decades during which Czechs "lived in dull fear of being observed or
judged." For several generations, societal monitoring was a, ubiquitous
feature of Czech life. After that period was over, the nation's president,
Vaclav Havel, recalled it bitterly, decrying a Communist leadership "that
finds it convenient when people keep an eye on each other, watch each other,
are afraid of each other ... that sees society as an obedient herd." As a result,
Nollen warns, "Don't expect, upon moving into your new home, to be
welcomed by your neighbors, or even to be greeted in a friendly way the
first few times they see you. In fact, don't expect to get to know your
neighbors at all." Nothing personal, he points out; "it's just how it is."
Calling Czechs "reserved" and noting that they present a detached air as they
"focus on what they are doing with their own lives," Nollen urges the visitor
who wants to fit in to "keep a low profile." As the cold war ebbs ever farther
into the past, some of this might change. But the notion of a loner culture, of
automatically fitting in by virtue of not having to do what is expected of one
elsewhere-smile, say hello, gush to strangers about how much you adore
their country is compelling.

Most urbanized cultures, in Europe as anywhere, are for loners a mixture of

heaven and hell. Finding one or the other is a matter of knowing where and
how to look. The rugged shores and misty hills of Ireland have long
enchanted hermits, even transplanted ones such as Wittgenstein, who for a
while adopted the seclusion of a seaside hut near Galway. Writers and monks
tend to be reclusive. Ireland prides itself on spawning writers and monks. Do
the math.

At the same time, "[t]he ability to talk easily to strangers is very noticeable
in Ireland," observes Patricia Levy, a longtime resident of West Cork.
"Unlike many cultures which go to great lengths to not have to recognize the
existence of another person, the Irish consider their day a success if they
have chatted to a foreigner or someone from another part of Ireland." The
result is "interminable conversations" in the pub, at the bus stop, in the
shops, in which each conversant is "politely but ruthlessly questioned," less
out of suspicion than out of endless curiosity. This constant round of talk,
Levy believes, "is part of the Irish mythbuilding process, part of the sense of
an essential history." Any stranger "seems incomplete until some of their
story is known and they have become a part of the oral tradition which helps
form the historical identity of a region."

Ireland, then, is shining proof of what loners know is true: We exist in every
culture, every country. We are here. And there. And everywhere. And every
culture, every country has a place for us. Whether this is a comfortable place
or not, or a visible place, a place free of meanness or shame well, that
depends. Ireland makes no attempt to discredit its bards and seers, mystics
and beachcombers. With pride and gratitude and simple tolerance, it knows
enough to know how anemic its heritage would be without them.

OTHER CUI:I'URES DISAVOW their loners, just as they also disavow their
gays, their disabled. Keep them under wraps. Pretend they aren't there.
What? Loners? Here? Or, presented with evidence: Okay, that guy's a loner
but it's only him. And he's a freak.

The Japanese word kata means "form." American journalist Boye DeMente,
a commentator on Japanese culture for over forty years, notes that from
earliest childhood onward, "every situation is expected to have its own
known kata"-a precedent, a way in which it is known to be done. Being out
of kata, DeMente warns, amounts to "a sin against society." He goes on to
add that "groupism ... prevails in every profession" and "there is relentless
pressure for [the Japanese] to join groups and stay in them."

To outside observers, Japan seems an almost impossible place in which to be

a loner. Signs of Japan's famous conformity are everywhere from its
phalanxes of uniformed schoolchildren and identically suited salarymen on
trains to its fashion-conscious teens all emulating the same idol-singers, to
its kata-ized systems for eating, bowing, shopping, and even handing a
colleague your business card. (Use both hands.) Japan is "a conformist
society where a clear line is drawn between inside and outside, strange and
normal," declares Time magazine, joining the international media chorus.
Foreign loners might be able to swing it, if only because the Japanese tend to
view foreigners as such aliens that normal behavior is not generally expected
of them. But within the herd, formalities so thoroughly govern speech,
gesture, and intent that human interaction anticipating it, participating in it
plays a crucial and constant role in nearly every aspect of Japanese daily life.
It matters very much which gift to give and which not to give, which colors
to wear in which season. To slip up is to run the unconscionable risk of
offending others.

What in Japan constitutes stepping outside, acting strange, would, in many

cases, in many other countries, go entirely unnoticed. Yet in Japan the
punishment is dire. The national press abounds in stories of ijinte, or
bullying-- in which a child is singled out for mistreatment by his or her
classmates. Any sort of "differentness" can spark #inze: severe acne, an
unemployed father, the wrong color hair one fourteen-year-old in Kanagawa
killed himself' in 1994 after his classmates relentlessly called him ugly.
Loners beware.
Y E TTH E OTHER side of this coin is that in Japan many loners have
thrived, most notably in the arts. One of Japan's bestloved contemporary
novelists, Haruki Murakami, is both elusive and reclusive, yet the reading
public adores him no less.

`Japan has a long tradition of treating loners with respect or at least

tolerating them," ,japan Times columnist Hiroaki Sato tells me, "even though
as in any society there has also been a strong pull toward keeping members
of a community in line." Bristling at Western journalists who wax "gleeful"
about "the dichotomy between Japanese conformism and American rugged
individualism," Sato contends that the solitary figure bent over a writing
tablet in a seaside shack or mountain hut is just as Japanese as any salaryman
on the bullet train. "Buddhism," he reminds inc, "at least as it was
transmitted to Japan, insisted that enlightenment required solitude."

The pull of solitude directly contravenes the crowd mentality that is Japan's
most visible feature. It almost seems as if no middle ground is allowed. And
a growing shift among ordinary citizens -not Buddhist monks, but kids and
workers- -toward solitude has the country's social critics worried. "More of
us are spending more time alone," frets the writer of an editorial in Mainichi
Shimbun. "People do not socialize in public spaces as much and seem to
show less interest in their fellow human beings. The more people feel that
they are bystanders with no connections to other human beings, the less
capable they will be of applying limits to their interactions with others."

THIS IMPLIES, OF course, that loners are wild beasts, out-ofcontrol

maniacs who flick the hats off strangers' heads and rant incessantly about the
best way to peel beets or lance boils. Loners, the columnist implies, have no
limits. The idea, in Japan, that being a loner makes you sick is most
strikingly illustrated by the increasing concern over a social phenomenon
that first seized the attention of the local press in the mid-1990s, then
gathered momentum and became a hot topic in newspapers worldwide.

Hikikomori, meaning "social withdrawal," refers both to the individual and

the syndrome now said to affect as many as a million young Japanese.
Hikikomori barricade themselves in their bedrooms, refusing, often for years
at a time, to come out. Typically it begins when a student quits school
abruptly, then holes up with TV, computer, and Gameboy behind a locked
bedroom door, emerging to raid the fridge only when the rest of the family is
asleep. Calling this "a national mental health problem," Asahi Shimbun gave
as one example a twenty-nineyear-old man "whose only communication
with the outside world] over the previous five years had been in the form of
written notes left on the kitchen table with instructions such as: `Get me a
video game magazine."' Asahi has also reported on parents who move out of
their homes, leaving the recluses alone there for fear that, if they stay, their
hikikomori children will murder them. Commentators on the phenomenon
say hikikomori simply would not have been possible in an earlier, less
affluent era. A generation ago, kids' bedrooms were not outfitted with arrays
of electronic toys and equipment and parents and teachers wielded more
control.

The foreign press shines its curious klieg lights on what it sees as more proof
of Japan's bizarreness. "Missing: the hermit closeted behind the bedroom
door," is the headline of an article on hikikomori in an Australian daily.
Dubbing it `Japan's lost generation" and "one of the most perplexing
mysteries in Japan today," Time quotes the director of a Tokyo-area
hikikomori outreach center who offers this explanation: "It's Japan. Here,
you have to be like other people, and if you aren't, you have a sense of loss,
of shame. So you withdraw" The editor of a magazine for and about
hikikomori speculates that a childhood spent trying desperately to please
others leads some to profound alienation and social burnout. By her account
and others, theirs is a farfrom-idyllic seclusion. It is merely, apparently, by
the hikikomori's own logic, a manner of coping, a last resort. Arguably, their
extreme response would not be necessary if Japanese culture was more
tolerant of loners in general, less eager to pounce on those who--from the
mainstream point of view drop the ball. It is as if, from behind their bedroom
doors, the hikikomori are taunting their tormentors: You want to pretend we
don't exist? Okay. We'll hide so well that the whole world will hear about it,
to your shame.

IF THE WORLD at large tolerates lonerism barely, if at all, throughout the

rest of the year, it is relentless at holiday time. Holidays vary from culture to
culture, and many an American loner traveling or living abroad has spent a
serene, guilt-free Thanksgiving or July 4 at work or at the beach or preparing
a favorite dinner far from home in a country to which those days do not
matter. Far from home, the loner is far from that social pressure which even
nonloners detest about holidays. There is this presumption that on holidays
we need to be somewhere. Need to be with people in general and in
particular with relatives who have a way of bringing out the worst in us and
in each other. Need in whose opinion? Theirs. The faceless they. Of all the
conventions agreed upon by the majority and thus taken for granted as the
will of some even greater authority, assumed to be right and true, the idea
that holidays must never be celebrated alone is ironclad. Holidays mark
milestones whose importance entire nations and religions recognize. So who
could say such days, infused with spiritual and political meaning, are too
profound to share? That sharing dilutes sensation, thought, meaning? That
holidays are thus best savored in a concentrated form: alone? Who could say
so? Loners. Blasphemers.

Criticism comes to those who beg off family holiday gatherings. How could
you do this to us? Aunt Doreen wants to see you before chemotherapy
makes her lose all her hair. You used to love Easter. I want the whole family
together for once you haven't seen your brothers and sisters all year. Why do
you hate us? This is going to kill your father. And criticism comes to those
without families and who beg off celebrating with friends or coworkers who
imagine themselves kind to ask us. "No One Should Have to Spend Holiday
Alone," declares a headline in The Compass, a Catholic newspaper. `Alone
for Christmas?" asks another, in a Mennonite paper. "If you are part of a
wonderful family, and have good friends near, then this will be a Christmas
to look forward to.... If you're facing the prospect of a Christmas alone ...
take comfort in Christ, our Saviour, who knows your anguish."

Granted, for nonloners the prospect of holidays alone is truly horrifying. The
media feeds into this horror by reporting, as Christmas approaches, that the
national suicide rate always soars at this time of year. That the claim proves
untrue and is more urban legend than fact only makes clearer the nonloner
bias, the contagion of nonloner belief. A team of researchers at the
Annenberg School for Communication collected sixtyseven newspaper
articles with a holiday theme that appeared between November 1999 and
January 2000. While two-thirds of the stories created the perception that this
is a deadly season, only eight of the stories cited any research attempting to
back the claim. The researchers found that in 1996, the most recent year for
which statistics were available, December actually saw fewer suicides than
any other month.
Holidays serve a sociological and anthropological function. In that sense,
they exist purely to unite people-compatriots, members of any given faith-
who by sharing celebrations cement their shared values and customs. In that
sense, too, holidays are an effective means of showing and teaching
tradition. All of this goes out the window if holidays are observed by an
individual, alone. Then what function do holidays serve, if not a purely
communal one?

A ritual one. And rituals are too often snatched out of the hands of the
individual, where they would mean more, and could be tailored to fit. And
what of those days that are, for whatever reason, red-letter days for the loner
alone? The anniversary of the first time he won a marathon? Of the first day
she saw the Eiffel Tower? Who has the right to decide what everyone should
celebrate? Maybe what matters most is the day you survived a car crash.
That is your holiday, yours alone.

AND IF THE world levels a basilisk's eye at holidays spent alone, neither
does it give any quarter to undergoing, alone, those minuscule celebrations
observed every day: meals. The act of eating, it is generally understood, is
another of those endeavors that bespeak human fulfillment when shared, but
when performed alone are evidence of failure, an Eleanor Rigby-ish last
resort, shameful and even sinister: It cannot possibly be fun. The chef Alice
Waters once told me she believes Americans "just aren't happy," and that
both a reason for and a symptom of our national sorrow is the fact that "we
aren't sitting down at the table anymore." The implication was: sitting down
with others. She cited a recent study that determined that 88 percent of
American children no longer share even a single daily meal with their
families. Whether or not this is making America fat and sad, as Waters
suggested, the comment reveals how deeply set, even at the very vanguard of
culinary culture, is the notion that meals eaten apart and alone are somehow
inferior.

Granted, wolfing a bag of Funyuns while watching Porky's 2 on video in an

otherwise deserted apartment is one thing, and relishing a mesclun salad at a
candlelit table in the same apartment so alertly as to pulp every leaf ever so
gently between the teeth is another. But loners, no matter our taste, eat many
meals, if not most, alone. At home, this affords the essence of choice and
spontaneity, thus the essence of loner experience: the true meaning of
"having it your way." Jell-O eaten from a toy pail with a toy spade while
taking a bath? A beef-tongue omelet? Why the hell not?

It is when loners go out that the going gets tough. Dining alone in restaurants
invites stares: furtive, curious, pitying. That poor man! Did his date stand
him up? Did the wife who used to cook his meals die? My friend Nicholas
dines out alone all the time. He has found that sitting at a restaurant's bar,
ordering and eating there, is easier and provokes less unwanted attention
than asking for a table all to himself.

"It's fine to sit at a bar and not talk to anybody," Nicholas says. Conversation
and eye contact are not expected there, as they would be at, say, the long
refectory-style tables featured in some upscale new restaurants. Nicholas
first adopted his strategy years ago at Jeremiah Tower's Stars Cafe in San
Francisco, where he discovered that, sitting at the bar, he could order off the
same menu as did diners at tables. And rather than facing those tables, seated
at the bar he had a direct view of bartenders and dishwashers and the
restaurant's hustle and bustle.

"It was like a show. So I was fine sitting there just being with myself."

Dining alone elsewhere, he says, "I've been eyed a little warily. And as
experienced as I am, it still summons an act of bravery from me, and I like
that. I like the idea of setting an exampleproving that it is acceptable to be
alone in a public place where everyone else is in groups, and to just be
sitting there eating, not having to be engrossed in anything else."

On a visit to Las Vegas, I once ate breakfast alone at the Circus Circus
buffet. I just wanted to see if it was possible, how it might be done. After
waiting on line for my first serving of eggs, waffles, cantaloupe, hash
browns, and coffee, I made my way to a booth that had been designed to seat
at least four. There weren't any smaller ones, and the sea of tables crammed
into the huge ring the booths made were too close together to bear. Jingly
ambient music mingled with the clatter of dishes, the thud of ketchup bottles
and mugs and the shrieking of children who have eaten too much syrup.
Nibbling the waffles, I took out a book and began reading. Coffee. Eggs.
Turned the page. It was hard to sit still. Something in the experience, in the
very fact of sitting alone at a booth made for many, in a vast restaurant built
to seat hundreds in a format that encourages eating fast, had an almost
physical effect, a propulsion, as if the pink vinyl seat would eject me. Very
deliberately I finished what was on my plate, left my book open, facedown,
and went back on line for seconds. Slowly. Meaningfully. As if it was the
most normal thing in the world.

But it was not. And I could feel that with every bite: that I was bucking a
tide, that it took great will to stay. That I was dining on borrowed time.

And this is why loners love takeout.

CIVILIZATION WILL GO on whether you attend the block party or not. It

will, whether you say hello and talk to anyone today or not. Whether you get
married today, or ever, or have kids or not. Its momentum is strong. It will
go on.

And on and on and on until it sucks up the last resources of the planet that
birthed it, according to ecophilosopher Pentti Linkola, a loner who believes
Earth is doomed because there are too many people on it. Linkola, whose
writings have sparked fierce controversy in his native Finland and around
the world, compares the planet to a ship that is filled beyond its capacity
with passengers and is capsizing. There is only one lifeboat, and only a
fraction of the passengers can fit into it. The best thing to do, he insists, the
only reasonable thing, is to hoist a few worthy survivors into the lifeboat,
then grab an ax and resolutely whack off the hands of any others who try to
climb on board. In Linkola's ideal vision of the world, its population would
be reduced to about five million-roughly one-tenth of one percent of the
current figure. This should be achieved, he insists, by the issuing of
parenting licenses only to those select adults who prove themselves
qualified. In Linkola's future, mandatory schooling would last only four
years, advertisements would cease to exist, handtools would replace electric
ones, forests would replace parking lots, hunting would replace other forms
of food acquisition, bicycles and rowboats would replace cars. Linkola
practices what he preaches. He lives alone near an isolated lake in which he
fishes for his meals. Not surprisingly, he has a lot of critics.

WHILE THE PRIMARY foes of Linkola's radical vision are consumerism

and industry, he is also saying that society in its current state greedy and
growing larger is a form of planetary suicide. Civilization's old habits,
learned in bygone times when survival depended on our all sticking together,
have in fact become liabilities.

At the very least, whether or not those habits bring about the death of the
planet as Linkola fears, they are clearly no longer required.

Your participation is now optional.

2.
listen to us
[POPULAR CULTURE]
If it's popular, then what in the world has it got to do with us? Well, that's a
secret.

ROWING UP HALF an hour from Disneyland meant being [taken

there at least once a year, some years many more. Under a bubblegum-blue
sky I glided through its gates, slipping under the silvery belt of the monorail,
then into the crush, a solid sunburned mass capped with felt pirate tricornes
and Goofy hats, trailing two-eared balloons all the way to the slate turrets of
Sleeping Beauty Castle.

Queuing up to ride the Matterhorn, its fiberglass snow twinkling in the

Orange County sunshine I would fall into a stupor. Like a hophead, I stared
blankly as tinny yodels pumped from the speakers, submarines plied the
sparkling bay across Tomorrowland, and all around me visitors cried, "Look!
There goes Daisy Duck!"

The jungle boats were bliss. The Inuit automatons singing its a small world
made my blood surge. Not that I knew it then, but mine was a different
euphoria than others felt. For them it was just fun, all rocket ships and tape-
recorded xylophones. For me it was a trance, a transmission: the heady buzz
of mysteries vouchsafed. I was the channeler. The chosen. Not that I,
whirling almost nauseous in a giant teacup, realized this.

Messages for me breathed from every cable, from the very asphalt. The
secret, though it took years to translate, was: This is what imagination can
do. Minds made this pirate ship. Minds made thoseJlying elephants.

Not just plain minds but Special minds, the minds that can.

Yours.
Wink. It was an invitation. A challenge. Seduction. Obligation. Troth. The
invisible partnership whose secret sign you always wear.

Not that I knew this then. Not that I realized, then, that there were those who
were creative and those who were not. That the creative made what the
others consumed. That the creative were few and answered to summonses
that no one else could hear. That this meant many if not most---of the
creative must be loners. That there was such a thing as loners at all.

Or that the minds behind Disneyland were in large part the minds of loners.
How was I to know about the loner Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney's early partner
and master animator, who created Mickey Mouse and whose innovative
animation techniques set Disney productions light-years ahead of anything
the entertainment world had ever seen? Or Walt himself, a selfpromoter
whose success depended on shepherding the workers he called his
"Imagineers"? Like me, he needed few friends and, like me, he got a
reputation as aloof.

SUPERMAN IS A loner. Tarzan is a loner. Batman, Spider-Man, Davy

Crockett, and Xena are loners. Elvis Presley tried to pass himself off as one.
The Lone Ranger, Tonto not withstanding, was a loner.

In the playground and the classroom and the office, we are mocked and
feared. The loner who goes home to feed his iguana when the rest of the
Crate & Barrel staff goes out after work for beer is despised, not idolized.
Yet on the screen, stage, and page, it is a different story. Here we see heroic
loners. Selfreliant, sexy loners. Rebels. Sages. Mages. Stars. The mob
worships imaginary loners. Pays to watch them. Wears T-shirts depicting
them, adopts loners' catchwords, dresses as them for Halloween. Frat boys
love Spider-Man, and so do Girl Scouts.

It is make-believe, but in that land of make-believe, we rule. We fucking

rule.

Now why is that?

In each nonloner lurks a tiny loner struggling to get out. Just as many if not
most loners possess, within them, an uncanny knack for entertaining others,
many nonloners possess, deep down in them, a secret touch of lonerism. An
impulse, a yearning it lies dormant nearly all the time, knowing that the
outside world would hardly make it feel welcome. It knows, this loner
within, that it is safer hidden. Yet now and then it is confronted with a rare
welcome in the form of some song or comic book, and it springs out:
clumsily, a bit insecurely, but hungrily.

There is another reason. Made-up loners capture mobs' hearts because, being
made-up, these rebels and righteous punks and rocketmen are made to
please. They are not heroic by accident but because they were created that
way. Created, often enough, by loners.

If loners are a minority in the world at large, we swell the ranks in the
creative world. The creative process lends itself to loners and vice versa.
And there is the key. This is why so much of what winds up in art museums,
movie houses, music venues, bookshops, theme parks and on TV has a loner
slant. Unlike fine art, popular culture targets the broadest possible audience.
But what no one wants to admit is how much of "popular" culture has
always been the work of a tiny, maligned subset of the population. The
subset that will not join hands. That does not know itself by name. Wink.
Nudge. It is not, perhaps, really the Jews who run Hollywood.

A loner who fashions a fictional character who is a loner will not make that
character a sleazy, ugly, hateful, unredeemed killer. A loner given the chance
to fashion a loner for the public eye will make that loner hot. Smart. Strong.
It stands to reason. And given our disproportionate presence among those
whose dreams and visions end up onscreen, on the billboards along Sunset
Strip, it stands to reason that so much of what has turned into American
popular culture over the last two hundred years has been loner propaganda.
We dish it up.

And nonloners devour it like it was pie.

Loner values once played a much larger role in American culture than they
do now. A nation founded by iconoclasts, a revolution won by outnumbered
outsiders. A wild land settled by rugged individualists: the cowboy and the
pioneer against the unknown, the uncharted, the frightening creatures whose
home it was. A protagonist on his own, brave and resourceful, making
claims and righting wrongs, misunderstood, a stranger in a strange land, pure
at heart. Loner values.

But the rugged-individualist-as-American-hero has been more or less

eclipsed in the culture, in general. A settled land functions on teamwork. A
slow but sure antiloner sentiment has crept into every chamber of the
American honeycomb. Loners, as portrayed in the media, have turned from
saviors to terrorists. Loner heroes are less obvious onscreen and on the stage
today than fifty or even thirty years ago. They no longer enjoy uncontested
pride of place. But frat boys still love SpiderMan.

It is easy to resent them for this. Eyeing the nonloner humming loner
anthems by Nirvana or wearing a Batman T-shirt, we think What the hell do
YOU know? Nonloners can just fleetingly grasp the meaning of those
anthems and those heroes. Sing though they might, wear what they might,
nonloners are ultimately left behind. They serve a purpose, though. They pay
the bills.

NOT ALL LONERS are creators. Many of us are consumers, and as such we
are devoted fans, after a fashion. Each of us in our own tiny way has loved
some next-big-thing. But loners as fans do not serve the purpose that the
entertainment industry wants fans to serve. We do not feed the industry
because, by nature, we do not proselytize, do not actively convert new fans,
do not create new markets. Early adopters, as trendsetters are called in the
industry, declare their love for something or other and become vortices,
passing the flame from friend to friend and follower to follower. Loners
stand apart from this relay race.

For most fans, it makes all the difference in the world that there are other
fans. Part of the thrill of those arena concerts is the fellowship, the frisson in
the fact of it, just as it is in war and church. The more fans share a love for
anything, the more valid that love looks. This is classic nonlonerthink. This
is one of those things bred in nonloner bones which loners fail to understand.
Nonloner fans compete over which of them can show their love the most, in
other words which of them can buy the most branded merchandise, attend
the most shows, tell the most friends.
Unmoved by the mass hysteria, immune to the contagion by which
nonloners spend fortunes just proving they like a certain song or style, we do
not give the entertainment industry what it seeks. We do not do as it would
wish. Neither spending the money nor sporting the outward signs of what we
love, we slip under the corporate radar, slip outside its gunsight. We are
invisible fans, the purpose of our fandom having just to do with us and the
objects of our affection, not with fellow fans.

We tend to react to these things we love in our own ways, which tend to have
more to do with feeling and imagining than with buying. This harks back to
the way I felt at Disneyland: that it was not simply a pleasure dome, but an
implicit challenge. Not an end in itself, but an inspiration.. ow that you have
learned about imagination, go and use your own. Do not waste your time in
the gift shop loading up on souvenirs. They will not bring you whatyou
need. Nonloners take being entertained for granted. For the mob,
entertainment is a finished product, not a starting point.

LONERS NEED POPULAR culture and need it badly. You might say that is
a contradiction in terms. You might say that what is popular by definition is
not meant for you. Yet even in these tricked-up versions of reality lies
information. TV gives no more an authentic reading of the real world than a
zoo gives an authentic view of animals. But we need clues. We scry mass
entertainments not as members of the mass, but in the interest of acquiring
snatches of its language.

And loners need information. Nonloners learn from fleshand-blood role

models. They find these everywhere, hitching their wagons to teachers and
friends and mentors with an ease that shocks us. And we might mock
nonloners for this, for being role-model sluts. But lacking that easy way out,
loners are forced to learn a lot from non-flesh-and-blood sources. Sure, we
burn with questions. What does a monsoon feel like, we wonder, but will
never bring ourselves to ask Mr. Singh down the block. What would it be
like to live through civil war, in a harem, on a submarine, as a doctor, raising
a family, being knighted, going over Victoria Falls in a barrel, falling in love
with a blind man, breeding baboons in the jungle, burning down a house,
battling pirates, plundering Egyptian pyramids? We cannot find out
firsthand, at least not yet. So we soak it up secondhand. We trust what comes
across to us on the screen, on the page because it comes to us pure. It asks
nothing of us. Interaction is work, is not our natural mode. Why should the
getting of wisdom involve an extra barrier, be an ordeal? Why put it behind
murky glass, as it is when it requires interaction, and attach a ball and chain?

Air HE DAWN of the twentieth century, political economist Thorstein

Veblen wrote about the rise of a new American leisure class to whom seeing
and being seen meant everything. It was Veblen who coined the phrase
"conspicuous consumption." A wealthy man's "own unaided effort will not
avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence," thus only by the showy
expenditure of money will others be sure to see and understand. "The aid of
friends and competitors is therefore brought in," Veblen explained, "by
resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and
entertainments." Such displays, such sharings of wealth, were nothing new.
Native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest had long since been
engaging in potlatch rituals based on the same principle. But high visibility
gave the new leisure class an unprecedented power, setting in motion what
has by now become a knee-jerk reaction and a main mechanism of the style-
making machinery: the masses imitating the privileged, either with
merchandise or manners or activities.

In Veblen's clay, "privileged" meant rich. Today it means cool and good-
looking and sometimes rich. By the mid-twentieth century, "keeping up with
the Joneses" had already become a vicious cycle.

With the emergence of urban life, Veblen wrote, "the means of

communication and the mobility of the population now expose the individual
to the observation of many persons who have no other means of judging his
reputability than the display of goods (and perhaps of breeding) which he is
able to make while he is under their direct observation." It is now customary,
and instantaneous, to identify strangers by their style, their choice of mass-
produced popular culture. Thus loners who eschew fads and movements are
elusive, offering few deadgiveaway clues. By Veblen's reckoning, we give
no evidence. Our observers "have no other means of judging" us. They do
not know what to make of us. Fancy their frustration.

IN 1939, WHEN Bill Finger and Bob Kane created their superhero, Batman,
they decided that the black-clad crimefighter would be nearly a hermit. In
the earliest episodes he broods alone in his cave, laying plans for punishing
the bad guys of Gotham City. Only later did Batman get a sidekick, young
Robin, for whom the loner was a mentor. As a representative of the "normal"
world, Robin makes Batman appear all the more marvelous.

Steve Ditko, the artist who cocreated Spider-Man with Stan Lee in 1962,
deliberately made teenage Peter Parker a loner: a nerdy, intelligent,
reclusive, orphaned teen who was not popular at school. His arachnoid
alterego was daring and courageous, though in his dark windowless room
after a dramatic adventure, Parker sometimes mused wistfully about his own
obscurity. The world could never understood him and didn't want to.

Something in the nature of comics-perhaps the sheer lowtech physicality of

drawing or the way words and pictures feed each other makes them a
startlingly intimate mirror for an artist's soul. For his comic Ghost World,
Daniel Clowes created a loner heroine in the alienated teen Enid Coleslaw,
whose view of the world is that only two people in it herself and her best
friend, Becky are at all worthwhile. Enid's name is an anagram of the artist's.
When the screenplay of the film version of Ghost World, which Clowes
coauthored with director Terry Zwigoff, was nominated for an Academy
Award in 2002, the cartoonist told me he couldn't wait for the celebrity
luncheons, publicity events, and even the ceremony to be over so that he
could go back to drawing in the quiet seclusion of his California home.

"Everything was going great until this happened," he told me, not entirely
joking, a few days before Oscar night. "The minute this thing's over,
everything will be back to normal. I can't think of anything more torturous
than having to give a speech in front of a billion people." Laughing drily, he
mused that a book about loners could easily be all about cartoonists. Clowes
had been profiled shortly before in the New Yorker, and he still felt the sting
of having had a stranger in his house watching him work and asking probing
questions. "There's a reason that we aren't actors," Clowes says of
cartoonists.

No POPULAR-CULTURE medium is aimed at a larger audience with a

lower common denominator than television. Worldwide, a billion viewers
really do watch the Academy Awards. This reality, the astoundingly massive
group consciousness that is entered at the flick of a TV's "on" switch, has
been reflected in countless ensemble shows-from soap operas to police
dramas whose crux is the relationships between their multiple characters. Yet
even from the living-room screen, a few important loners have emerged.

Riding the shirttails of cinematic Westerns, which we will investigate

elsewhere in this book, no less than two dozen TV Westerns were airing
during prime time every week by the end of the 1950s. Apropos of the
Western genre, many of these series spotlighted singular heroes in a time and
place whose openness and lawlessness made individualism iconic and made
selfreliance romantic. Launched in 1958, The Rieman was the tale of a
single-dad loner perpetually setting things straight with an innovative rapid-
cocking rifle. Have Gun Will Travel is the story of another loner in the form
of a highly ethical hired killer. The tellingly titled series The Loner---created
by The Twilight zone's Rod Serling-featured an ex-Union soldier on a
solitary sojourn in search of personal meaning.

In these programs, guns flash. Stunning Western scenery sweeps past. But
what matters most is the man. We watch his eyes. We wonder what we
would do in his shoes. Historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have said
that the American West is the key to our national identity, that from its man-
against the-wilderness dynamic sprang our pluck, our independence, our
inventiveness. As we have seen, the paradigm of the Wild West is a loner
paradigm: the outsider, the self-reliant carver of his own future, the screw-
you individualist. Nonloner viewers feel that inner cowboy stirring deep
inside, and in him they feel a wistful anguish at what has been lost. Actual
loners see Wild West adventures as transparencies to be fitted over our own
lives. Lariats aside, is navigating a tricky stretch of Jackson Hole alone on
horseback all that different from plotting a course through a day at the office
when time clocks, bosses, and coworkers are the rattlesnakes, the rapids, the
Sioux on the warpath?

LAUNCHED IN 1972, the TV series Kung Fu introduced Caine, a half-

Chinese, half-American martial artist. Solitary and consummately
circumspect, Caine kicked and spun his way through dangerous encounters
on the frontier, forever guided by Buddhist wisdom learned in boyhood at
the feet of his old master in China. True-life martial-arts star Bruce Lee had
inspired the TV series, whose dreamy but lethal-footed fictional loner soared
to prominence as an unlikely role model for adolescent boys.

Adolescent boys, loners or not, tend to like to kick things. That they would,
en masse, filter their kicking fervor through a quiet, gunless character such
as Caine gives pause for thought. Because he must fight unarmed, Caine is
more independent than other Wild West heroes and, in effect, more potent.
With only his limbs as weapons and with ancient philosophy elevating his
fighting above mere brutish ferocity, Caine exemplifies heroism refined to
its essence. By this logic, the ultimate hero is the ultimate loner. So by virtue
of being loners, we, too, are all heroes. Like Caine, we are strangers in a
strange land, outnumbered, out-armed. Like Caine, we look defenseless, but
our secret, like his, is that we are not.

BULLHORN THAT IT is for rebel voices, rock music has from its outset
attracted loners. Like comics, rock at its roots is primal, minimal, a body
and, maybe, an instrument. Nostalgic critics lament that rock was co-opted
after Woodstock, when greed and cynicism poisoned its rebel ideals. True
enough, later rock has a less and less lonerish sound. At the turn of the
millennium, hiphop was the world's top-selling musical genre, and almost
universally its lyrics laud togetherness. We be clubbin'. Gangbangin'.
Gangsta love. Rock the party. A Snoop Dogg hit in the autumn of 2002
features the singer urging a woman to share her sexual favors with his
friends: "It ain't no fun," goes the refrain, "if the homies can't have none." A
far cry from the tattered outsider pleading, Oh Lord, please don't let me be
misunderstood.

Ever media-savvy, Elvis crafted his public image carefully and consciously,
vaunting himself as a loner more of a loner than he actually was, some
insiders say. But he knew the new genre he was spawning was all about
alienation. About being misjudged. He worked it.

His fans seized onto this ethos as well. Posing as outrageous fringe-dwellers,
early rock stars launched one of the most powerful pop phenomena the
world has ever known: youth culture. And while it is a mass movement,
conformist nearly to the point of fascism, its core message-rock's creation
myth-is that of the loner. Of Bob Dylan turning his back on society with a
sardonic croak: Don't think twice, it's all right. Rock lyrics lend themselves
to lonerism: disenfranchised, individual, poetic, emotional, personal. Youth
culture, thus pop-music culture, is a very strange animal because it is a
collective loner culture. How much of its loncrism is a put-on, is artifice,
depends on the performer. The star is spotlighted and amplified. The star is
set apart, untouchable, glorious, gifted, driven.

DESPITL THE CAMARADERIE in the Beatles' early public image, from

the outset John Lennon was assessed by insiders as aloof and -a typical
charge thrown at loners--standoffish. Lennon kept to himself. "The smart
Beatle," as he was known, wore a distant smile that suggested he inhabited a
rich but private inner world of which his songs and stage persona offered
only fleeting, tempting glimpses. The photographer Jurgen Vollmer, who
worked with the group in its early Hamburg days, recalls Lennon as a
"mystery behind sunglasses." By contrast, outgoing Paul McCartney was "a
very nice, warmhearted man. Always smiling. ... But that wasn't the case
with John. He was much more complex and I didn't feel completely
comfortable with him ... he was never that accessible as a person. He was
very guarded." Onstage, Vollmer reflects, Lennon forced himself to seem at
least a bit more social "in order to play to his audience."

The concert stage is at once the world's most private and most public place.
It is a bridge: On one side lies the dreamy, solitary netherworld where art is
born. On the other lies the fleshy crush of fans, the press, the public image.
For loners whose success depends on navigating that span, disaster always
lurks. Tales are told of legendary rockers who, at crucial points in their
careers, slipped out of sight, sometimes out of life.

After founding Pink Floyd in 1964, singer-songwriter Syd Barrett was one of
Britain's most promising young voices. A former art-school student, Barrett
reacted badly to touring and the social pressure it entailed. He started
ingesting drugs, one cohort later recalled, "by the shovelful." Throughout
one concert, Barrett remained absolutely motionless onstage, like a
mannequin. Shortly afterward, in 1968, he quit the band. During his last-ever
interview, in 1971, Barrett told a reporter, "I'm disappearing. I'm full of dust
and guitars." He promptly went into permanent seclusion, though fans
worldwide remained fixated on Barrett's short but blindingly bright
trajectory. In 1988, his brother-in-law Paul Breen was interviewed on British
radio. "Contrary to public opinion," he declared, Syd-who had gone back to
using his birth name, Roger-was "not living in a field in a barrel somewhere.
He is living in a semi-detached house in a suburb of Cambridge ... I think the
word `recluse' is probably emotive. It would probably be truer to say that he
enjoys his own company now rather than that of others." Barrett had stopped
playing music, but had once again taken up painting, his old love. As the
years wore on, backpackers periodically camped outside his home, but he
pointedly ignored them.

Releasing a solo record in 2002 after years spent in seclusion at his

Minneapolis home, the Replacements' Paul Westerberg told the San
Francisco Examiner that he had written his new songs "to entertain myself.
After four years holed up in my house, I didn't want to watch TV anymore
and I was sick of reading books. So I just sat down at home and began
playing." To the reporter, who called him "an avowed recluse," the
influential songwriter explained his own loner philosophy: "Nobody thinks
so, but I actually do love the people who care about me, and if I'm in a room
with them I feel very protective. If it's a room full of chowderheads, though,"
Westerberg said, he will simply "walk out."

Guns N' Roses became the biggest-selling band of the late '80s before its
aggressive vocalist and cofounder Axl Rose left the public eye and went into
seclusion. In 1999, MTV reported that Rose had turned from "the rock
world's most notorious star to its most puzzling recluse," noting that
"sightings of Rose have been virtually nonexistent" since the band's last tour
eight years before. In 2000, Rolling Stone dubbed Rose "rock's most famous
recluse" and ran a probing interview in which the "recluse locked away
mysteriously at his Malibu estate" told the reporter: "I don't find it's in my
best interest to be out there. I am building something slowly, and it doesn't
seem to be so much out there as in here, in the studio and in my home." He
was to reappear two years later at the Grammy Awards ceremony.

Others have not survived the crossing. Folk-rocker Nick Drake became a
posthumous sensation after a 2000 Volkswagen Cabrio commercial featured
his moody song "Pink Moon" as its background music. Ironically, the
commercial showed a carful of attractive young friends enjoying a moonlit
drive Drake himself was a notorious loner. Little appreciated during his
lifetime, he died at twenty-six of an overdose that may or may not have been
deliberate.
Nirvana's Kurt Cobain sang wrenchingly of a loner's angst in songs like
`About a Girl," whose shouted refrain is: "But I can't see you every night-
free!" Here, the singer acknowledges his attachment to the lover in question,
yet repeatedly declares his need for private time and space. Never, he warns,
must she expect more of him than he is willing or able to give. His tone is
not sneering, not taunting, just desperate, as if he has exhausted himself
striving to establish boundaries which others refuse to respect. A song on the
band's Nevermind album is titled, tellingly, "Stay Away." The more
numerous and adoring Cobain's fans grew, the more alienated he felt from
them. He killed himself at twenty-seven in 1994.

ROCK STARS ARE expected to be tortured loners. Alienation and

separation go with the territory. This, too, is a nonloner fantasy: for fleeting
moments, playing air guitar, nonloners visualize themselves onstage, holding
the hordes in thrall, making them scream, cream, sweat. Just as they do when
watching Batman, they picture themselves getting a loner's glory but,
because they cannot comprehend it, not his pain.

For famous ballplayers, the virtual opposite applies. Nobody wants them to
be loners. Their every move watched by millions, these are team players in
the most literal sense. Professional team players are paid handsomely for
acting like anything but loners. They must cooperate, follow instructions,
and anticipate the thoughts and actions of others. Basketball, football, and
soccer would be entirely different games, albeit more interesting ones, if
every player made up his own rules.

So when an occasional exception to the rule makes the big leagues and plays
like a dream but remains an unrepentant loner, neither fans nor the press are
very willing to forgive. Joe DiMaggio led the New York Yankees to ten
American League pennants and nine World Series championships, but his
fierce love of privacy won no hearts. Reporters called him vain, tyrannical,
imperious, brooding, moody. One wrote about the many well-wishers who
"wait for hours sometimes" to have a personal glimpse or a word with
DiMaggio, "waiting and knowing he may wish to be alone; but it does not
seem to matter, they are endlessly awed by him, moved by the mystique, he
is a kind of male Garbo." Another loner was Ted Williams, the Boston Red
Sox hitter who won baseball's elite Triple Crown twice and was the
American League MVP twice, in 1946 and 1949. Williams demonstrated a
frank lack of interest in his fans, refusing, as a rule, to tip his cap to the
crowds at Fenway Park. It made him fair game: One New York Post writer
fumed that "when it comes to arrogant, ungrateful athletes, this one leads the
league." Musing on Williams's death in 2002, an ESPN reporter asked,
"What if he had been as determined to be liked as he was determined to be a
great hitter?"

After hitting the home run that broke the all-time singleseason record in
2001, the San Francisco Giants' Barry Bonds leaped onto home plate.
History had just been made. Yet his teammates, rather than storm the plate to
embrace him, stayed in the dugout and kept their distance. Bonds was not a
hugging kind of guy. Arguably the greatest player of his generation, having
hit his 600th home run in 2002, the San Francisco Giants left fielder remains
one of pro sports' most talented and most admired athletes, but also one of its
most definitive loners. He trains alone whenever possible, socializing with
fellow players as little as possible. Nearly every article about him mentions
it. Predictably, many also call him aloof, arrogant, hostile, and cold. "He
seldom lets people inside his inner circle," USA Today noted in 2001. "Some
call him combative and moody. Most of the time he's just unavailable."

What difference would it make, Bonds asked the USA Today reporter, "if I
changed and started acting nicer to people? ... I just wish people would
accept me for who I am. Why should I change? ... I don't care what people
say or what the media portrays me to be, I'm proud of who I am. The Bible
says you don't have to be nice, or not nice. Just speak the truth. Jesus always
spoke the truth. Not everybody liked him, either."

When his team celebrates big victories in the locker room, Bonds stands off
to the side happy, but separate. In an ESPN interview, he acknowledged that
the media would be much kinder to him "if I could just smile at everybody
and wave." In 1993, during his first year with the Giants, he asked a reporter,
"Why can't people just enjoy the show? And then let the entertainer go home
and get his rest, so he can put on another show?" Asked how he felt as his
team drew close to winning the World Series in 2002, he told the San
Francisco Chronicle, "It's hard enough for me to come in here and talk. I
want to do my talking on the field. That's where it counts."
Bonds's problem is, he's real. It's his humanity, the fact that he lives and
breathes. Because he is a human being, nonloners cannot quite bring
themselves to fashion Bonds into a superhero, an icon whom they can
wholeheartedly impersonate in their fantasies. He resembles them too much
biologically to transcend the distrust and dislike they feel for the flesh-and-
blood loner down the block. Bonds would have been better loved if he were
a cartoon.

DURING THE SECOND World War, the BBC aired seemingly absurd lines
of dialogue The dog barks at midnight and suchduring its daily
programming. The vast majority of listeners never knew that these lines
were secret coded messages for the Resistance, over the Channel in France.
The messages announced actions and strategies, the comings and goings of
paratroopers.

Like loners, Resistance fighters were outnumbered, unseen. They passed as

ordinary citizens, but secretly they stood apart. In every home and army
base, every shop and office, the BBC was popular culture. Only Resistance
fighters, alone and in secret, could extract from that flow of comedies,
concerts, and dramas seeds of meaning, blueprints they and only they knew
how to use.

We neoloners are not likely to throw grenades onto Nazi transport trains.
But, like Resistance fighters, we can prick up our ears for codes the mob
does not know are there. Tricked out with coonskin caps and spider feet, the
codes say Hey, I'm here and This i's possible and Watch what we can do.
Staticky though they might be, crowded out by other signals, the codes are
still there. The mob doesn't know it. The mob is singing and dancing to our
codes and does not know it.
3.
do you feel lucky?
[FILM]
Brave and bold and alone: Where have all the cowboys gone?

TN O.NF HOUR PHOTO, released in the summer of 2002, -Robin

Williams played Sy Parrish, a middle-aged man who works behind a
SavMart photo-developing counter. Williams drew critical raves for his
performance as what the San Francisco Chronicle called a "well-played
loner" who becomes obsessed with a middle-class family whose snaps he
develops, and whom he stalks with terrifying results.

"Sy is a typical disturbed loner," the Northwest Herald asserted. He is "a

sinister loner," the Manchester Guardian offered though another British
paper called Parrish simply "a private man who very much keeps himself to
himself."

The New York Daily News reflected that, given the film's allusions to
hunting, "the camera here comes to symbolize the weapon a loner might use
to describe and defend his territory."

A reviewer in Knot magazine mused that his generation, the eighteen-to-

twenty-five-year-olds, is keenly familiar with "this type of social-misfit
drama: Loner meets object of affection, loner tries to make connection, loner
gets rejected, loner gets really violent....

"Outside the movie theater and throughout our day, we see these loners
everywhere and we try to ignore them because, frankly, who wants to be
reminded of the failures lingering around our own lives?"

For effect, the film's production designer drained every scene featuring Sy of
all color except white and gray blue. Writer/director Mark Romanek, a
former music-video director, told one reporter that his inspiration for One
Hour Photo was a type of film that emerged in the 1970s dramas such as
Taxi Driver, The Passenger, and The Tenant, in which isolated men inhabit
worlds of their own: small, cramped, crazy worlds.

It was not always this way.

YOUNGER MOVIEGOERS WHO do not frequent revival theaters or video

stores' vintage racks might never know that for a long, bright span in the
middle of the twentieth century, loners were the undisputed heroes of the
large screen. Saviors. Soldiers. Savvy characters, survivors who had lived
and learned and could never be led. Their solitary nature riding alone,
fighting alone-highlighted not failure or neurosis, but strength. Self-reliance
under pressure, against all odds, under fire. The evil in such films, which
comprise genres that held the whole world in thrall, is not within the loner,
but without. The loner is a force for good: all the stronger and purer for
being concentrated in a single, solitary human being.

From a loner's point of view, of course, loner characters by definition

provide filmmakers with ready-made material. No two of us are alike. And
we live by our own codes. We combine big imaginations with an air of
mystery, of the unknown. Our motivations are our own, thus unpredictable,
thus interesting, in theory, to probe. As outsiders, we look and sound unique.
Imagine how dull Mad Max would be if Max smiled and waved at everyone.
As outsiders, we can have only one-of-a-kind adventures and misadventures.
Charlie Chaplin knew this. Buster Keaton milked it.

IN THE GRITTY world of 1940s and early 1950s film noir, it is difficult to
find a hero who isn't a loner. The classic noir protagonist lives alone in a
cluttered bachelor apartment that appears never to have had a visitor. He
drinks alone in bars, drives alone down mean city streets and empty country
roads. He needs and trusts no one and nothing, and he tells us this in
wisecracking, world-weary voice-over. Private eyes, falsely accused
fugitives, morally complex hit men, saps suckered into mayhem and double-
crossed; these knights in rumpled suits are disillusioned, disaffected,
wracked by nightmares. Striving to right wrongs, escape or overturn
injustice, or simply to score, the noir hero is a small man in a big, dark,
incomprehensible world where he is brutally tested, battered, accused, and
persecuted. In voice-over, he recounts his victories, but also his mistakes,
explaining stoically the self-determined rules by which he plays. It gives
these films an intimate first-person feel, accessing that private one-of-a-kind
domain that is a loner's heart and mind.

Femmes fatales tempt him. Friends reveal themselves as enemies. Little is

what it seems, we learn from this loner. And he emerges strong and
uncorrupted-or else he dies trying.

As THE HARD-BOILED detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and

the hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Humphrey
Bogart played the classic noir loner: alienated, lean and hungry, cigarette
always lit. Marlowe was the brainchild of loner novelist Raymond Chandler,
who infused Marlowe and his other protagonists with poetic grit, their
scowling masculinity affording, in certain lights, a hint of vulnerability that
makes onscreen loners especially attractive. Aspects of these heroes were
based on the author himself A hard-drinking recluse, Chandler was dubbed
by Time magazine "the poet laureate of the loner." He loved writing, but
acknowledged that it was isolating work. He told interviewers it suited his
true nature better than any other career ever could.

As a contract killer seeking retribution from a double-crossing client in This

Gun for Hire, Alan Ladd is tender under a coldblooded exterior. Taking
refuge in a hideout after a murder, he cares for a stray cat, noting that he and
the creature are both loners and thus kin under the skin.

Cinematic protagonists had never been so morally ambiguous before, nor so

willfully alone. At first glance it seems odd that such dark films noir, we
cannot forget, is French for black-were so popular during wartime, when
escapist comedies and fantasies are the more obvious cinematic fare. But
films noirs served a psychological and emotional purpose for American
viewers in that era. Noir protagonists with their disaffected, walking-
wounded worldview were surrogates through which viewers could process
their own wartime traumas. Even victory in a big war inspires guilt, horror,
and shame, deep down: conflicting feelings of national success and personal
loss, patriotism but also grief, conflicting desires to remember and forget and
the knowledge that millions have died, far away, for my freedom, in my
name. These crises, universal yet scrupulously ignored over pot roast at the
family dinner table, threw each American into a kind of isolation. In a
bravely smiling, goody-two-shoes world, it would not do to break down and
shriek I have blood on my hands! The ideal surrogate outside, alone,
questioning authority, finding the truth beneath surface appearances was the
noir hero. Quintessentially observant, revealing the evil that men and women
do: only the loner.

AS THE WAR faded from memory, becoming less of a tactile trauma and
mercifully abstract, cinematic heroes changed. They doffed their suits and
put on chaps. Still, they stayed loners.

By the mid-1950s, America's Wild West had emerged as the new arena in
which heroes would be tested. Here in the wideopen spaces, under huge blue
skies, searing deserts and majestic peaks were symbolic proving grounds for
loners remote enough in dress and era to let viewers identify with them only
so much. Safe amid the squeaky-clean hi-neighbor brightness of the times,
Americans could ingest loner-lessons-rugged individualism, independence,
claiming a domain- -without having to take them quite as personally as they
had taken noir films with their modern urban landscapes.

Exuding the wood-smoke whiff of nostalgia, Western-film loners lived by

their own laws in a land owned by no one, their hearts as hard as their
saddles but as unfailingly true as their aim.

Western films had been around since the beginning of cinema, but silent-era
Westerns were black-and-white in both morals and film stock. The new
arrivals set messy dilemmas amid Technicolor valleys, deserts, and plateaus
loner dilemmas that forced protagonists to choose between lives of
companionship and loose-limbed, solitary freedom. In The Searchers, John
Wayne plays a die-hard outsider, a Civil War vet on a mission to rescue a
niece who has been kidnapped by Comanches. As the story draws to a close,
the brave loner confronts the classic choice: settle down with a family or ride
into the sunset alone? He rides.

In High Noon, Gary Cooper plays a town marshal whose isolation is

portrayed as all the more righteous when his entire town-even his new bride
--abandons him, leaving him to face a gang of professional killers on his
own. Cooper won a Best Actor Oscar for his role in a film that is arguably
the most important loner-Western ever made, and in the eyes of some cinema
scholars the most important Western ever made.
High .Noon's exaltation of the righteous loner is also a political parable.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, writers, actors, and directors were
ruthlessly investigated by the U.S. House Un-American Activities
Committee. Those suspected of having communist sympathies were
blacklisted and denied the right to work or, if they worked in secret, to take
credit for their work, often at the apex of their careers. The loner standing up
for justice against an evil enemy outranking him in power and numbers was
used frequently during that era to symbolize the victim of McCarthyism,
often in films whose credits were riddled with pseudonyms of blacklisted
artists. High Noon's screenwriter Carl Foreman was one of these.

BUT TO TRACE the image of loners in cinema from that point onward is to
trace a fall. From lovable tramps and noir knights and righteous riders it is a
downward trajectory into madness, horror, ultraviolence. From hero to
antihero to freak to scum of the earth.

Think Psycho. Think Willard and its ratboy. In A Fistful of Dollars and its
spaghetti-Western sequels, Clint Eastwood created a solitary figure so far
beyond the reaches of familiarity as to neither possess nor need a name.
These films' Man With No Name is a renegade loner and sometime bounty
hunter who says little and kills a lot. In 1971, Eastwood created yet another
unforgettable loner, an iconoclastic San Francisco cop who, in Dirty Harry
and its sequels, hunts down crooks however he damn well pleases, taunting
one of them, Do you feel lucky? (The actor embodied both roles so
convincingly that a 1993 biography of Eastwood is titled Hollywood's
Loner.) Harry Callahan and The Man With No Name were edgy and
enigmatic: ciphers neither as philosophical as noir heroes, nor as true-blue as
traditional Western ones. They reflected a shift. The loner as main character
was becoming less sympathetic, less a force for concentrated goodness, less
identifiably human. Less an inhabitant of a recognizable world.

In Mad Max and its sequels, Mel Gibson's loner postnuclear cop takes on all
comers with a vengeance after a biker gang murders his wife and child. In
Blade Runner, Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard is a loner ex-cop on a mission
to exterminate androids amid the plastic brutality of a futuristic Los Angeles.

Loners on film had become misfits, losers, marginalized and doomed.

Consider Dustin Hoffman's limping, fringe-dwelling thief in Midnight
Cowboy. Bud Cort's death-obsessed youth in Harold and Maude. Winona
Ryder's misunderstood adolescent who communes with ghosts in
Beetlejuice. Johnny Depp's tender, deformed freak in Edward Scissorhands.
The leading genres of the post-Vietnam years were not loner genres. Buddy
movies, family sagas, feel-good classroom dramas. Fame. The relentless
friendliness of Forrest Gump. The fraternity of Star Wars: may the force be
with you. And you. And you.

Loners went mad, lurking in basements. Their motives no longer made

sense.

The prototype for cinema's latter-day loner was 1976's Taxi Driver.
Twitching with rage and paranoia, Robert DeNiro's wanna-be assassin Travis
Bickle terrifies. He stalks a pretty campaign worker, plots to kill a politician,
likes pornography. Areyou talking to me? he asks his own image in a mirror
in his shabby flat, armed to the teeth. Leering, he adds a line that says
everything about what loners meant to the world then. A landmark line:

I'm the only one here.

A violent act perpetrated near the end of the film turns him into an accidental
hero. The sinister irony of this is hardly lost on viewers. Other loner psychos
followed. Christian Slater's homicidal teen in Heathers. Michael Douglas's
terrorist Beek in Falling Down. One Hour Photo's stalker Sy. Make your
own list.

WHY SUCH A fall from grace?

As realism became more the fashion, as viewers began to take films more
and more personally, cinematic protagonists and their morals became less
allusive, less symbolic, less abstract. And so loner protagonists could no
longer be heroes.

Another force has arguably hastened their descent. As corporations grow

larger and advertising grows more sophisticated, culture in general glides
more than ever into groupthink. Entertainment in the twenty-first century has
more than ever to do with marketing strategies. What becomes popular now
is increasingly determined by which manufacturer can spend the most
money parading its product. And, increasingly, audiences are handed
entertainment, prepackaged, with merchandising and mob behavior as not-
very-well-hidden agendas. It is in the corporations' best interests to dissuade
viewers from emulating loners, who tend not to adopt fads and to eschew to
peer pressure, and thus who tend not to spend as much on entertainment's
byproducts, and on tickets to big-name blockbusters, as nonloners. Thus it is
in corporations' best interests to make loners look bad.

Silly. Ugly. Crazy. Predatory. Lethal.

Oscar-winners Shine (1996) and A Beautiful Mind (2001) offered loner

protagonists. Both were mentally ill, their separateness from others a
symptom of their illness. In the latter, schizophrenic mathematician John
Nash is urged to socialize, to become part of a group, as a strategy for
combating his symptoms. One of the most celebrated cinematic loners of
recent times appeared in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs: Hannibal Lecter,
the elitist, misanthropic cannibal. In 2000's successful The Grinch Who
Stole Christmas, holier-than-thou villagers torment a loner who, because of
his unwillingness to share in their tradition, is marked as evil, only to be
redeemed when he conforms. At the start of 2001's Shrek, its titular ogre is a
mean, malodorous loner with low selfesteem. He becomes a sympathetic
character only after the arrival of a donkey sidekick and a love interest who
turn the film into a buddy picture whose moral is that loners can be nice and
happy only when they stop acting like loners. The runaway success of
Spider-Man in the summer of 2002 is an exception to the rule--but its
character and story had already been around, and establishing loyalties, for
forty years.

Kevin Costner's costly 1997 epic The Postman was a return to the old ways.
Its do-gooding loner wandered a desecrated, postapocalyptic American
West. Critics called it one of the year's worst films, not without reason. But
intriguingly, they lambasted not just its slow pacing and wooden dialogue,
but the loner archetype itself. A New York Times reviewer complained that
Costner "has tried to turn [The Postman] into a classic 1950s-style western
in which he is the revivified embodiment of that hoary movie archetype, the
Man With No Name." The film's sensational failure seemed to puzzle
Costner, who had believed in the picture so deeply that he not only starred in
it but had also produced and directed it. "I loved making The Postman," he
told the New York Daily News in 2000. "I understand they're showing it in
school [s] now to illustrate mythic heroes."

Despite this film's intrinsic flaws, this is a terrifying fate. What does it mean
when loner icons become classroom fodder, relics to be studied, like the
Hundred Years' War and the cotton gin? The fact that the curriculum for such
lessons is a film that was singled out as the worst in a year that also
produced Nemesis 4 and Bleeders adds insult to injury.

That solitary big-screen righter of wrongs-the vulnerable but attractive

fringe-dweller-is not entirely obsolete but a severely endangered species. In
his place have come repulsive loners, sympathetic only in the most perverse
sense, and/or only when they stop being loners.

You may or may not subscribe to the conspiracy theory in which

entertainment conglomerates are killing loner heroes in order to keep those
outsiderish values from reaching the public. Maybe. Maybe not. Has the sun
set on Mad Max? Is he an artifact? If loner role models are slipping out of
sight, we have to catch them while we can. And if the theory is true, we must
teach our descendants where to find their loner heritage: revival theaters and
the vintage racks in video stores are our Louvre, our Forbidden City, our
Smithsonian.
4.
marlboro country
[A DV IiRTISING]
They want us to want what they're selling-hut that would mean wanting what
everyone else wants.

TV COMMERCIAL for Smirnofl' Ice begins with two pals

_Lchugging malt beverages in a laundromat. Together, for fun, the guys
overload the washers with soap flakes and switch them on. As the bubbles
rise, other patrons jump into the act. Exhilarating music plays as the crowd
wiggles around, euphoric, in chest-high suds.

Loners bristle at being advertised to. We might not mean to bristle, might not
even see the bristle, but what else would loners do at being told to buy not
just objects but lots of objects, and for dubious reasons --because others buy
them, because someone who is being paid to say so says to? Objects doomed
to rapid obsolescence. Objects whose shimmer onscreen and in magazines is
the exact same kind that loners see in the real world and realize is false, is
cheap, is there only to trick the stupid and will disappoint. We know this on
some level when the cheese melts on the pizza ad, but sudden hunger lunges
out of nowhere and plucks our guts, too. We know we do not need a car,
nasal spray, lipstick, life insurance, or at least not the specific brand or color
being waved in front of us. How dareyou tell me what to do? And yet we
want.

Advertising is antithetical to the loner mentality. Yet it is masterful. It makes

us clench. It turns us into accidental rebels: suffering the ache and labor of
resisting strong-arm tactics, shunning the attractive, the seductive, the
lavishly marketed. Resisting ads, insisting on buying what we want when we
want and if we want, is radical. And failing to resist makes us feel, deep
down, even just a bit, like Judas.

Or at least like idiots.

Time spent alone has a way of winnowing the inventory of what we need. It
reveals that some of our best delights derive from the intangible---from
actions, experiences, thoughts rather than objects. Not that every loner is a
miser or minimalist. I, for one, would not say no to a new lava lamp. But to
decrease contact with others is to decrease the number of items that seem
necessary. It is the presence of others and exposure to the mainstream media,
the insecurity and camaraderie sparked by those kinds of contact, that also
spark the impulse to buy. Look what HE has. I want to impress HER.
Desiring and requiring stuff means casting your lot with others. Intrinsically
we know this. Being a rebel is tiring. Especially when you are up against a
great hypnotic army that looks like Naomi Campbell and whose battle cries
are so catchy that you cannot get them out of your head.

ADVER'T'ISING IS HARDLY a new idea. In one form or another, it has

been around since the first vendor at the first marketplace hawked wares
with provocative come-ons. It is any smart retailer's natural instinct. With the
advent of printing, the idea of advertising to the masses took a great leap
forward and never looked back. Early print ads focused naively but logically
on the products' quality and their makers' efficiency. An ad posted in an
Indiana newspaper in 1833 promises that chair maker and sign painter
Samuel Rooker "will punctually attend to all orders with which he has been
favored. He is prepared to do all kinds of turning (his lathe being propelled
by steam) in the best manner and on the most favorable terms ... executed
with neatness and promptitude." A Victorian-era ad for Massachusetts's
Worcester Corset Company declared simply, "This is by far the BEST corset
and skirt supporter ever made."

But the process has become increasingly sophisticated over the years
especially the last fifty--as technology and wars and the rise of youth culture
have spawned more jaded and overstimulated consumers. Undisguised
superlatives and boasting, We're the best! no longer do the trick. The modern
advertisement is a product of scientific exactitude. Advertisers make
informed and expensive use of art, psychology, and sociology. They draw on
research, not just wishful thinking, to effect consensus and start fads. They
rely on the masses' ready-made assumptions that certain things are beautiful,
desirable, worth having. Not having them, advertisementthink goes, is to be
uncool, a drag, left out, a fool. And that is a fate worse than death.
Advertising does not operate one-on-one but one-on-millions.

But loners cannot be unified. Our only shared feature is separateness,

elusiveness, refusal to connect. We are the absent audience. We cannot be
held because we are not even there. A clever ad for outboard motors in a
sporting magazine might seize the attention of loners who own boats. But
even then, we are hard sells. Because we do not feel as one with others or
equate ourselves with others, we suspect whatever is popular. I am not the
only loner who puts off seeing top-ten movies or reading topten books. That
way our reading or seeing is not knee jerk responding. Testimonials from
others leave us cold. Gushing disgusts us. I think I might never read Angela's
Ashes. We snicker and shudder at the presumption in phrases like "Happy
Meal."

GIVEN THEIR \VEALTH and the ferocity of their intent, advertisers buy
top talent to serve their ends. It is no accident that brand logos and slogans
are more famous worldwide than most national anthems and flags. The Nike
swoosh. The golden arches. Levis' little red tag. Call them sellouts if you
will, but some of the most talented artists, writers, musicians, and techies on
earth work in advertising. And since so many creative people are loners, we
have to face the fact that some of the minds behind advertising are lonerish
minds. We have to hand it to them. Even as we shrink in horror at the gross
manipulation of Just Do It, we nod in reluctant admiration for those loners--
we know they are there-unseen, uncredited, cashing huge checks for
hawking SUVs and cat food for the enemy.

It could have been me. After graduating from Berkeley with an English
degree, I started looking for journalism jobs. My father felt this was a waste
of my talent. Someone as clever as I should reach not just the residents of
some city but of the whole world, he said. A woman in his car pool worked
at a big L.A. advertising agency. Through her, he arranged for an interview.
A sharp-suited executive leafed through my collegenewspaper clippings. He
smiled, nodding. You've got something here, he said. You're good.

Good at aiming to please. I had honed it all my life as an escape tactic. Make
them laugh, then tiptoe away before they open their eyes. I had been poring
over ads since I was three. We had Sunset and Good Housekeeping
magazines in our house. I knew precisely how to call pesticide "magical"
and margarine "golden." I knew why toucans should be used to sell fruit-
flavored cereal.

After the sharp-suited executive suggested that I enter the firm's training
program, I went home and watched TV. The ads glimmered and roared with
new importance. This is my new life. Band-Aids for little ouches. A
miniature man rowing a boat around a toilet bowl. Detergent sold by a
knight on a snowwhite horse.

A diet-soda ad.

It had been made especially for me, for my kind, nubile females not sure
they should stop hating their stomachs. The actress lay on a beach towel, in a
swimsuit, as the camera traced her silhouette, lingering at her tiny waist.
Cinnamon skin, sleek with oil, so taut I could swear I saw her pulse. One
calorie, the song went. The 1-sound lingered on the tongue of the singer,
promising beauty to smart girls who drank sugar-free soda, promising, from
the sound of it, oral sex.

They knew exactly how to do it. Admiration soared inside me, mixed with
the impulse the ad intended me to feel. Drink me, as the note on the bottle
told Alice down the rabbit hole. And that mixture of admiration and impulse
made a chemical reaction. It was the sizzle that makes you think uh-oh right
before passing out. All of the implications did not penetrate my childish
mind. Not the moral dubiousness of art being used to manipulate, and not the
larger picture in which one creative person, me for instance, could be paid to
make the masses jump in unison. I did not see it as a loner issue, then. I only
saw it as a crime to sell women low self-esteem, of which I myself was a
sufferer. I never went back to the agency.

I could have become an advertiser and seen it as some kind of revenge

strategy: the loner getting back at the masses by treating them like the
lemmings they are. Jerking their reflexes, draining their bank accounts, and
laughing my solitary head off. I would have been rich now

DAVID NVOLLOCK WAS an ad copywriter for a national music retailer

before leaving that job to write books on popular culture. Explaining to me
the basic philosophy behind advertising, he is pragmatic.
"Advertising promotes the common ideal for everything," Wollock says. "If
the common perception of beauty was fat women with no breasts, then all
the ads would show fat women with no breasts. It's a numbers game: how to
reach the largest number of people effectively." The formula by which
companies' advertising budgets are calculated is based not on cost per
individual viewer, reader, or listener, but on cost per thousand viewers,
readers, or listeners.

"It's a mob mentality," Wollock says. "Most people like to think of

themselves as part of a mob." Inclusiveness is king. When ads show people
having fun, the implication is that the product is the source of that fun.

A Dr Pepper ad campaign that aired in the 1970s tapped into the loner
mentality sort of. Far overshadowed by Coke and Pepsi, Dr Pepper was a
"loner" in the cola industry. Knowing this, and with no hopes of outselling
its competitors, the company decided to capitalize on its own outsider image.
In the commercial, a lone figure, quirky-looking but kookily cool, was
shown drinking a Dr Pepper as the jingle began: "I'm a Pepper." One by one,
other oddballs appeared, also drinking Dr Peppers, as the song asked,
"wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too?" The implication was that all those
lone oddballs out there are lively folks with minds of their own who use
those singular minds to choose a singularly delicious drink. These loners, the
company implied, are having lots of fun. ltiouldn'tyou love to join these
loners?

But even the Dr Pepper campaign proves that from an advertiser's

standpoint, fun is portrayed most effectively by groups. The softball game,
the pool party, the giggling clique "the message," Wollock says, "is, `Hey,
look what you're missing!"' Sometimes that message comes as a whisper,
sometimes as a shout, teasing, or bullying. If a loner is looking, then the idea
is to turn him: Tweak his lust or make him insecure or get him thinking Hey,
I'm lonely! Failing that, Wollock explains, advertisers have no use for loners.

"Why would they want to approach you?" he asks. "If you're not
impressionable, you're wasting their time."

They spend a fortune making us look as if we don't existor that if we do, we

aren't having any fun.
CORPORATIONS BATTLE HARD to create brand loyalty, to make vast
numbers of consumers prefer, for instance, one cola over another even
though blind taste tests regularly show that there is little distinguishable
difference between major brands of coffee, soda, beer, and cigarettes. Such
items, dubbed "parity products" by industry insiders because, for all intents
and purposes, the items are identical, must be hawked not on the basis of any
tangible distinction. Instead, their success depends on the advertisers' claims
that each has its own personality, individuality, its own message, and that
certain brands speak for certain sectors of the population. Lifestyle, sport,
gender the bigger the sector, the better. Thus Virginia Slims were pressed on
female smokers in the early 1970s, during the first big wave of feminism, as
the "women's cigarette." Again, the lure and implications are all about
inclusiveness. Clothes emblazoned with product logos are all, in a way, team
uniforms. Wearing a Nike shirt or Red Bull hat is a declaration of
membership. I'm part of something big. Such displays, replicated a hundred
times over in any street scene or school hallway, reveal the nonloner bias.
Brand loyalty means Hey, I'm not a loner.

Thus portraying loners as consumers in commercials is counterproductive. In

liking to think of themselves as part of a mob, David Wollock says, "most
people don't want to think of themselves as brooding and alone." An
unrepentant nonloner himself, he muses: "Why would any ad show a
depressed loner who masturbates five times a day? Well, okay, if you're
marketing rubber blow-up dolls, sure."

Along those lines, the industry magazine Advertising Age used a 2002 Coca-
Cola commercial to illustrate its lament that "the world's most iconic brand
has lost its way" In the ad, a solitary hitchhiker on a deserted roadside in the
Rocky Mountains waves a bottle of Coke at a passing big rig, whose thirsty
driver stops and picks him up. That the trucker would be "sufficiently lured
by $1.09 worth of cola to pick up a bearded loner" is so implausible, the
article posits, as to be key "evidence that the company is at a loss to
understand, in all its priceless dimensions, its own flagship brand." Or, at
least, the company "sure doesn't understand how to advertise it."

THIS RULE HAS its exception. Cowboys sell.

And cowboys are, in the public imagination, loners. Independent. Inviolate.
Like America. Rugged individuals who speak the truth, shoot from the hip.

The advertising cowboy, like the cinematic cowboy, eludes all those
prejudices leveled against loners in the real world. Behind the wheel of a
Ford Bronco, he is not seen as a loser or a lonely pervert or a nerd. He is not
seen as secretive. The opposite: without saying a word, he is meant to
convey an openness like that of the big blue Western sky.

As such, the cars he hawks are not compacts, but behemoths with Wild-West
names like Forester, Pathfinder, Rodeo, Range Rover. Sinewy hands
gripping the wheel, he races across plateaus and down mountain roads. In his
deadpan gaze is a look of quiet victory.

He sells cigarettes too, pimp that he is. Real cowboys smoke. Any day at a
rodeo proves that. But tobacco is not unique to the Wild West. Faced with
the challenge of promoting a parity product, Marlboro might just as easily
have chosen any other archetype-a sailor or a hipster or an English lord. Yet
the cowboy, the loner, was chosen. In the 1950s, just when the real Wild
West was breathing its last, the Philip Morris company introduced its
cowboy icon. Designed by the Leo Burnett advertising firm, the "Marlboro
Man" was a ploy to broaden the appeal of a brand whose promotions, until
then, had wimpily called the cigarettes "mild as May." Burnett's new ads,
featuring the cowboy, promised that Marlboro "delivers the goods on
flavor"-alluding to actual cowboys' work of delivering herds cross-country to
slaughterhouses but also packing a subtle sexual punch. When the ads went
national in 1955, sales skyrocketed, reaching $5 billion that year: an increase
from just one year earlier of 3,241 percent.

Are the fragrant glowing leaves in every cigarette a small personal campfire,
signifying the loner's dominion over all he surveys? In 1964, the ad agency
gave a name to the mythical "Marlboro Country," whose sunsets mirrored
the crimson in the brand's logo. After cigarette commercials were banned
from TV in 1971, the solitary figure lent itself to print ads and billboards so
perfectly that, one year later, Marlboro was the world's best-selling tobacco
product.
How ironic that the Marlboro Man is, today, the most famous cowboy in the
universe and practically the only one still in the public eye: a true loner, the
sole survivor of his genre. (And how sad that he is held responsible for
countless lung-cancer deaths including, most famously and ironically, that of
the male model who portrayed him for years: Wayne McLaren died in 1992
at age fifty-one. In his wake, Camel cigarettes' icon, `Joe Camel," has been
similarly blamed for spawning a new generation of teenage smokers.
Perhaps indicative of loners' ever-descending public image, Joe is a social
animal, usually depicted amongst a clutch of cool camel pals.) Unlike the
cinematic cowboy, the Marlboro Man is not a figure from the past, clad in a
vintage costume. He is a contemporary cowboy, his prairies crisscrossed
with paved superhighways. He brings those old values right into the present.
As such, as the most famous cowboy in the universe, he represents for
millions around the world America itself. Thus the arguably most famous
aspect of America around the world is its loner aspect. America the
individualist, the victorious and eternal loner.

As such, the cowboy has now been co-opted to sell cigarettes to Eastern
Europe. Where better to press the macho loner into service than a place
where, as Ayn Rand could have told you, individualism has for millions been
only an uncatchable dream? Cowboys bow down to no authority. Cowboys
do what the hell they want. Nobody spies on cowboys.

Eastern Europeans were already die-hard smokers by the time Philip Morris
arrived. While nearly forty years of public-health campaigns in the United
States had lowered the proportion of adult smokers here to some 25 percent
by the mid-1990s, the World Health Organization determined that eastern
and central Europe were at that time home to the world's highest proportion
of adult smokers some 60 percent of men and 30 percent of women. And
that's not counting the kids. Offering higher-quality cigarettes than the
locally produced ones to which Eastern Europe was long accustomed, Philip
Morris leaped at the chance when restrictions were lifted on advertising in
those countries. As Radio Free Europe reported in 1997, cinemagoers in
Prague regularly saw the Marlboro Man in lengthy ads preceding films: "The
mythic character's chiseled features are accompanied by displays of fine
horsemanship, incredible scenery from the American West, and a soundtrack
suggesting high adventure.... And in the Russian capital as throughout the
East, the Marlboro Man stares down at passersby from innumerable
billboards." Not only did "his" cigarettes taste better, they also symbolized
the just-now-possible good things that come with being a loner: privacy,
independence, discernment. It has been estimated that Philip Morris's
exports to the region soared by more than 400 percent within four years in
the mid- to late 1990s.

A CYNICA►. OBSERVER might argue that today's youth is as ruggedly

individualistic as the next Pepsi commercial tells it to be.

When ads trumpet our right to decide, they are strumming our cowboy
consciousness. In creating brand loyalties, they brilliantly if perversely
combine team spirit with our vision of ourselves as bold choosers, defiantly
unique. "Have it your way," the classic Burger King commercial sings. "Be
you," coaxes an updated Dr Pepper campaign. An ad for Vans sneakers that
appeared in the summer of 2002 showed six styles of Vans side by side,
differing from one another in color and, though only slightly, in style. The
text read: "People make choices. Choices make people."

Real loners might well hiss at this deceit. We are not entirely sure we want to
be a Pepper, too.
5.
i have to go now
IFRIENDS HIP]
We pick the cream of the crop, then expect them to understand that we want
to be alone.

IN THE HOME page of a Web site for people seeking relationships,

visitors are asked to sign "the following oath otherwise known as the
Friendship Promise." Presented in petition form, the oath assures that the
undersigned will "dry your tears ... comfort your fears ... give you hope" and
"help you cope ... we are here for you." Who, exactly, is meant by you and
we is not entirely clear. Will these hundreds of signers really dry my tears?
Are they really here for me?

The oath includes a preface:

"WHEREAS any healthy loving relationship is founded on friendship.

"WHEREAS no one should ever feel alone or friendless with so many caring
people in the world...."

And, most crucial of all:

"WHEREAS many violent crimes in our schools these days are commit[ted]
by those others describe as A Friendless Loner.'..."

POSTMODERN NOVELIST Kathy Acker, whose angry works included

such titles as Blood and Guts in High School and My Mother: Demonology,
died in 1997. A mourner posted a lament on the Internet. Some eight years
earlier, this mourner had accompanied Acker to an art show where "I met her
friend Cindy Carr, who wore a woolen jacket on that summer afternoon. I
recall that Carr was polite but very withdrawn. And now, reading the
obituary [which Carr wrote for] the Village Voice, I discover that Carr
portrayed Kathy as a loner. That description says far more about Carr than
Kathy."

For this angry mourner, the word "loner" constitutes out-andout slander. It is
not merely a matter of using a less-than-accurate word. It is a matter of using
a word whose connotations, in the mourner's mind, can only be negative.
Thus the best strategy is to throw the insult back at Carr, to punish her for
defaming the personable Acker with the 1-word.

How, then, to mete out punishment? By citing as evidence Carr's

"withdrawn" mien and unseasonable outfit- what kind of freak would wear
wool in the New York summer?

As it happens, I once met Acker at a party. She was chatty with our hostess,
who was a beautiful musician and radio personality. Acker kept her distance
from most of the guests, a mixed crowd of struggling artists and unknowns.
Why she kept her distance, I cannot know. A witness, that day, might have
surmised that Acker was a loner. But another witness might have surmised
that she was shy, stuck-up, aloof, having a bad day, feeling ill. What are
loners to think of the angry mourner's insistence that Acker had a lot of
friends? Similarly, after suicidal teen Charles Bishop crashed a plane into a
Tampa office building in 2002, initial news reports called him a loner.
Within days, the press was falling all over itself apologizing for having
smeared Bishop in this manner. He had friends, the networks shouted. And
we'll quote a few to prove it.

Is that what they think, then? That loners have no friends?

OF ALL THE ways in which loners are demonized, one of the most
insidious regards our capacity for friendship. The crucial distinction fails to
be made between a capacity for friendship, for relationship, and for
companionship: the time actually spent in others' presence. Seeing us alone,
the mainstream jumps to conclusions: that we have no friends, want no
friends, are not capable of finding friends. They conclude that loners are
either too mean for friends or too unlikable. Too misanthropic, too angry to
entertain the possibility of kindred souls. Too spacedout, too selfish, insane,
inscrutable, withdrawn to attract any even if we wanted to.
Which of these scenarios is the worst? None is pretty, but which is worst? To
have no friends because we are unlikable is human: pitiful, but human. Not
to want friends renders loners beyond pity, beyond recognition, past
humanity. It makes us monsters.

Of course loners have friends. Fewer than most nonloners have, maybe. But
loners, with our extra capacity for concentration, focus, our fewer
distractions, make excellent friends. To a few. One, maybe, but a real one.

But why do nonloners care? Why don't they cheer because the fewer friends
we have, the more potential friends for them? They care because they need a
universal currency by which to judge us. And friendship is something they
all understand. A nonloner need not be smart, skilled, or in any way
distinguished to have friends. Sometimes it seems the least distinguished
acquire friends the easiest, giggling and jostling strings of chums. Instant
collectives. All their lives, nonloners have dealt in this currency. They know
its feel, its soft smoothness when old, its shine when new. Regarding
friendship and its value, every nonloner is an assessor, an assayer, a
professor.

And based on what they see, they say we lack friends. Thus we lack value.
And by this standard alone, the friend standard, our characters are
assassinated universally.

It is all a mistake.

FOR SOME LONERS, a paucity of friends is a matter of time. There is

simply too much to do alone, no time to spare. Shared time, while not
entirely wasted if the sharer is a true friend, must be parceled out with care,
like rationed flour. And time shared, even with true friends, often requires
loners to put in extra time alone, overtime, to recharge. It is a matter of
energy: As a rule, loners have less for the social machinery, the talk and
sympathy. Our fuel runs out. This is what nonloners don't understand about
us, what they cannot see. We do not choose to have such tiny fuel tanks.
These can be quite inconvenient. They are why we seem rude, when we do,
why we seem bored and often are. Spaced-out and often are. Running on
empty.
Not heartless. Not unappreciative. Not fools. We know the rest of the world
has big tanks. We know they don't know.

I am hypoglycemic. I like sugar very much. Chocolate halvah, coconut

cream pie. I know how little of it I can stand before the onset of sick, cotton-
headed shock. But blood glucose can be measured in medical laboratories.
Tolerance for company cannot. (Yet.)

No one wants to make himself sick. And if our vector is an overdose of chat
regarding diaper brands or whom the Redskins might get as their third-round
draft pick, we retract.

By contrast, the average nonloner seems able to stand hours and hours with
almost anyone. Sometimes it seems they would rather have anyone around
than no one. The absence of friends, at least companions, is by their lights an
abomination. The result, from a loner's standpoint, is that many nonloner
friendships are matters of default. Of convenience. Such high tolerance for
company, we might argue, makes for much lower standards. To say loners
must be choosy sounds stuck-up-the very charge nonloners always throw at
us but regarding friends, it is true.

NONL ONI:RS HAVE. A set of rules by which friendship is played. Dry

your tears. End your fears. Give you hope. Help you cope. Loners play by a
different set of rules. Ours is a smaller set. A simpler set. A purer set. Critics
would call it rudimentary, unreasonable, skewed. They do not understand
that what we have to give is not what always what others have to give.

We care. We feel. We think. We do not always miss the absent one. We

cannot always come when called. Being friends with a loner requires
patience and the wisdom that distance does not mean dislike.

Troubles always ensue when assumptions clash, when expectations do not

match. Nonloners who wish to be our friendsand they do, it happens all the
time arrive assuming that their rule book is the only rule book. We are aware
of their rules, just as immigrants come to recognize words in the languages
of their adopted nations, yet speak their own languages at home. We are
aware of their needs. Their idea of fun, their entreaties, their sense of time
and how much is enough-these are all too familiar. Not sharing them makes
us outlaws and, before we know it, we are being called bad friends.

A FEW YEARS ago, I met a very nice person. Nice and outgoing, so much
so that people who knew I knew her told me I was lucky that she liked me.
Like me she did: calling, coming over, planning outings.

How did I feel? Guilty. Any stirrings, warmth, aflection lay under a guilty
lid. Sure I liked her, though I saw differences between us that she seemed not
to see or to think were unimportant. The aspect of me she called "the hermit"
she thought charming insofar as it was artistic, part of the mysterious charm
of artists. The idea of me, her new friend, holed up in a room behind a
locked door hunched over a manuscript was titillating in the abstract, as long
as it happened at those times when she did not happen to call and want to
chat.

It came to pass how could it not have? that, in tears, she said I was rejecting
her. She had a soft heart, she said, and it hurt because of me. I tried to say
that she knew companionship only as an artesian well, always bubbling,
being renewed constantly. She thrived on drinking from it, lived on it. She
pouted, though she would not have called it a pout. Of course I thrive on
friends, she said, friends are the most precious things to me in the world and
you are one of those. You were.

I wondered whether holding back, saying I have to go now after long chats
on the phone they seemed long was rejection. By her heart, it was. We both
should have known sooner.

ONCE, ON THE other hand, I adored a friend so much that I made

exceptions for her. We spent endless hours and days together and I never
once looked at the clock. I told her everything, I let it all out. At the time, I
thought I would have died for her.

She was my first friend. We were five. Until then I had met many children,
kids at school and in Bluebirds and in the Jewish youth group and in the
neighborhood and strangers to whom my parents made me introduce myself.
They passed before my eyes like tadpoles in a stream. Then I met her. She
was funny. One look sent me squealing, doubled over, not daring to catch
her eye again for fear of bursting. She was smart. Wanted to be the first girl
Sherlock Holmes, looking for clues on the streets of our tract, a playing card,
a cigarette butt, and wishing they added up to something. She was daring
and keenly observant.

I gave my friend objects. Any book or seashell in my bedroom she admired

or even noticed-it was hers, no matter how hard I had worked to acquire it,
no matter how much I treasured it. Here, have it. Every detail, every spark,
we shared. Laughing all afternoon. Crying all night. The trillion secret jokes,
secret names, secret codes.

She was not a loner. So could she be blamed for not always listening? For
trying, sometimes, to escape?

But she always came back although sometimes not right away. I made a
good choice. Fine investment, as an investment, for loners, friendship always
is. We are still friends. We have a lot of laughs. She still wants to solve
mysteries, to figure out who the Green River Killer is.

Even so, I do not seize the phone and call her, or anyone, when I feel
miserable. This is one of those acid tests that separate the true loner from the
person who is alone but would much rather not be: even in the gloomiest
gloom, it is not my instinct to talk it over. Not that I am sufficiently brilliant
as to console myself every time. It is more of a wallow. But instinct is
instinct, and instinct will out.

FOR LONERS, FRIENDS are all the more essential because in many cases
they are our sole conduits to the outside world. They are channels, filters,
valves, rivers from the outback to the sea. When we find good ones, we pour
ourselves into them. Franz Kafka, the Czech author who explored his own
experiences as a loner in such works as "The Metamorphosis" - whose
protagonist awakens to discover that he has been transformed into a huge
cockroach-had a best friend in whom he trusted implicitly. Kafka met Max
Brod at university, and they remained close throughout Kafka's life; it was
Brod who brought Kafka to his parents' home when Kafka was mortally ill.
And it was Brod to whom Kafka gave his dying instruction: that all his
unpublished manuscripts be burned. Instead, Brod published them. Does this
make him a bad friend, or the best friend a writer ever had?
Emily Dickinson is infamous for her reclusiveness. Yet it might surprise
many who are more familiar with her reputation than her actual writing that
she was no stranger to friendship. Her sister-in-law, a family friend, a literary
critic each of these earned Dickinson's trust, her faith, and were the subjects
of her poems as well as their rare early readers. Yes, for the last sixteen years
of her life, from the age of forty onward, she never left her home and
addressed visitors only through a partly closed door. But the idea that loners
who look as if they have no friends know nothing of friendship are belied by
lines such as "I should not dare to leave my friend," and poems such as this
one:
It is all too easy for loners to forget how many of us there are, out there,
somewhere. We generally will not meet each other, will not recognize each
other and rush over, bubbling, urging each other to meet all of our other
friends. Friends do not come easily to us. Too often we can be fooled into
believing we do not have "enough" of them: that this reflects, as the outside
world would have it, harshly on us. Or we can be fooled into believing that if
we are too picky, we do not deserve for our search to end. It does. Or we can
be misled into thinking that company, just a bit, betrays our true identity as
loners. It does not. Not if she makes you laugh. Not if she always knows
when it is time to go.
6.
just catch me
[LOVE & SEX
They think we're eunuchs or compulsive masturbators. Either way, we're
fucked.

RE YOU A LOVER," asks a singles Web site in inch,high letters,

"OR A LONER? Love means lots of things to lots of people. For some, it's a
blissful overabundance of romance, passion, or friendship. To others ... it's
plain evil."

A quiz follows "to find out whether you're a LOVER or a LONER." Its
multiple-choice questions ask, for example, whether Valentine's Day means "
(1.) spending time with my partner; (2.) nothing terribly special, just another
day; or (3.) dressing up in an overcoat, going to a city park, and shouting
`Shame On You!' at anybody holding hands." Participants are asked to pick
their favorite "romantic movie": "(1.) Sleepless in Seattle; (2.) Casablanca;
or (3.) Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

Meanwhile, a list of official slogans for National Condom Week includes

(along with When in doubt, shroud your spout and Never deck her with an
unwrapped pecker): Don't be a loner; cooeryour boner.

In the eyes of the outside world, loners' sex lives come in two varieties.
Either the nonexistent type we're atom-splicing nerds wearing unfashionable
pants and mustering all the erotic drive of eunuchs. Or else we are raging
perverts. Poring over porn not even ordinary frat-boy porn but creepy porn -
we masturbate compulsively. The attitude is revealed again and again in
articles such as the Denver Post lifestyle-section story in which a
psychotherapist cautions singles in the dating scene to make sure all their
potential partners have oodles of friends: "Get to know who they hang out
with," the therapist warns. "Many sexual predators are loners." San
Francisco sex-advice columnist Isadora Allman regularly urges readers
seeking partners to engage in as many social and communal activities as
possible, from clubbing to staging charity carwashes-as if spending time
alone was the short route to sexual misery.

It is in this realm, from romance to love to making love, that loners arc
perhaps the most grossly misunderstood. Love and sex are such personal
pursuits, so intrinsically private that it seems impossible to make snap
judgments about who wants what or with whom. Yet, private as they are,
love and sex have been rendered public through the huge lens of the media.
Gone arc the days when one's choices were limited to friends, friends'
friends, friends' siblings, siblings' friends, cousins, second cousins and, at
most, the residents of a given community. The search has gone worldwide.
So a process that begins with only two two hands touching, two minds, two
souls out of' six billion is presented to us as a mass movement, like track
meets or college entrance exams, in which fierce competition and
performance pressure shape the rules. Your opponents, your competition,
comprises everyone besides yourself. Potential mates, too, could be anyone.
Think of the mathematics: anyone. And you are locked into the race. It goes
on constantly until you settle down, maybe forever, a heaven or hell
depending on your point of view.

Meeting anyone at all is not a loner's long suit. Meeting an assembly line of
maybes has as much appeal as severe sunburn. Opening lines, small talk,
seem repulsive-- -and we haven't even mentioned pursuit. Spending any time
even with those we know, even with old friends, can grate. For loners,
spending time with strangers, again and again, a stream of strangers, not
merely to get it over with but to discern whether someday you will put your
tongue inside this person's mouth, is the definition of surreal.

As for sex, that level of intimacy lies at the end of a journey whose
navigation no loner can take lightly. Social creatures, for whom saying hello
is second nature and, it follows, can keep up light conversation in a crowded
bar, have a knack for telescoping those stages between strangerhood and sex.
Between them, it's just understood. And between them it seems easy to make
casual arrangements of the sort that Benjamin Braddock, sleeping with a
woman twice his age in The Graduate, likened to "shaking hands." At least it
looks that way to loners, for whom every stage on the journey looms large.
Just realizing that someone else is near, not even looking, sparks a loner's
instinct to escape.
All this reality has little bearing on what outsiders presume. Prejudiced
minds think in extremes, imagining that all loners want to be all alone at all
times. That even die-hard loners might let someone else in, someone, just
one but all the way in, simply messes up the stereotype. And that stereotype,
so all-pervasive, makes us feel more self-conscious, more defensive. "You
said, `Leave me alone,"' the world argues. "Was that a lie?" Well ... no. Even
anchoresses, the reclusive medieval nuns who sealed themselves inside tiny
cells for life, are known to have now and then relished meaningful
relationships. The eleventh-century British nun known as Eve of Milton, for
example, crossed the Channel to live near Angers in France, where she
shared her seclusion and what one poet would soon afterward call "a
wondrous love" with a male anchorite named Hervey. It has been said
before, let's say it again: "loner" is not a synonym for "misanthrope." Nor is
it one for "hermit," "celibate," or "outcast." It's just that we are very
selective. Verrry selective.

Loners being as private as they are by nature and sex being as private as it is,
what after all is the public to conclude about sex and loners? Where would it
find its information? In the newspaper? The college dorm? All that jerking
off, furtive yet not quite out of roommates' earshot, after long solitary nights
at the lab fuels a modern archetype: loner as loser, without so much as a
chance in hell of even losing his virginity and, in the process, spoiling
masturbation's reputation. In the first case, sex + loner equals unspeakable
horror; in the second, belly laughs. Both sums make sexually satisfied loners
into oxymorons. Even so, a sexy loner surfaces now and then, though more
splashily in film a la Bullitt and Pump Up the Volume and She's All That
than in real life. But more on sexy loners later.

I'M MARRIED. To a loner. That makes two of us. Returning to the math-
class metaphor, you might argue that loner + loner = nonloners, that being
together obviates our loner status, cancels out our claim. Arguing back, I
would say, "Look at us"-well, don't, we're in our pajamas, but I swear we're
still loners, now as before. One of the public's biggest misconceptions is that
loners care nothing for love: that we do not, cannot. Yet what drove Emily
Dickinson's fieriest poems? Marie Curie, half of one of science's most
famous and devoted couples, was a loner. Even Ted Kaczynski, the one
figure with whom most modern loners would least like to be associated (and
albeit who, in the final analysis, might not really be a loner at all), is said to
have longed for love, sought instruction from a family friend in the writing
of love letters, flirted in his own strange way with the town librarian who
unwittingly helped him research recipes for explosive devices, and upon the
marriage of his brother mourned his own singlehood.

My loner husband and I live in a house masked by green hedges from

nonexistent passersby on a lane so obscure that it has no sidewalks, in a
district remote from the flutter of life in town, the route from there to here a
maze of' switchbacks on heart-attack grades. People who have spent decades
in our town have never heard of our street. We know no one will ever just
drop in. We knew that when we found the place, hidden in plain view as if
under an enchantment. That was one of its major attractions. The realtor
suggested cutting down the hedge. We caught each other's eyes and smirked.

Putting two smelts together does not make them sharks. They stay smelts, so
here we are, glad that the doorbell never rings, staring down at the phone in
horror when it occasionally does, letting the machine answer. As writers,
pursuing a solitary profession, we hole up silently in different corners of the
house. Mean as it feels to admit, each of us secretly applauds when the other
goes out on errands, leaving the whole house empty save one, though neither
of us wants those errands to last long. On holidays it is just us. Weekends,
just us. To extraverts, this might all seem so inhospitable, so isolationist. But
we have gone to great lengths to make our lives this way, on purpose.

In meeting him, I was lucky. I was not looking. (Lucky!) We hit it off right
away, and one of the likenesses we recognized in one another at once was
that we were loners. When two loners meet in a potentially romantic
situation, the relief surges like a tidal wave. We are so much more likely to
meet nonloners. And say we bond with one, say attraction or intellect or a
shared interest in Sailor Moon overcomes this fundamental difference. A
shark and a smelt together will not both turn into sharks or smelts, and the
difference will always loom. My father used this argument when telling me,
while I was an eighth-grader wearing lots of eye shadow, why mixed
marriages never work and why I must stop ogling the Catholic boys.
A FRIEND OF mine, a loner, is also married to a loner. They have three
small children, and while they adore their children, a certain worry started
when the eldest one was born: suddenly, my loner friend and her loner
husband had company. And it would stay. And it seemed blasphemous, the
worst depravity, for them to reel in shock at this. They wanted kids. They
still do. They are very good parents. But even in a huge house with a huge
backyard, having kids makes loners much less alone. Kids need things. They
need attention. When they are small they do not know the meaning of the
words interrupt or private.

This prospect has made many modern loners decide to stay childless,
married or not. But such a decision is a luxury, like roller blades and
ibuprofen, that only moderns can enjoy. Only recently did loners gain the
ability to wed knowing confidently that, if they wish, they can remain
childless. Before the advent of dependable birth control, walking up the aisle
was walking straight into a tunnel that led directly to parenthood. Getting
engaged, then, loners knew what they were in for. It makes you wonder how
many stayed single before, say, the mid-twentieth century, simply because
while they craved partnership they knew they ought not to be parents. Too
many loners, throughout the ages, have become parents without wanting to,
without having a choice, and have not had the talent for it. Too many loners
have been bad parents boiling with resentment at their shattered privacy,
blotting out anger and regret with mead or laudanum or gin or Valium and
shouting from behind a locked door, Leave Daddy alone! Until recently, not
being married meant not having sex, especially for women. Think of all
those loners, down the millennia, who consigned themselves to celibacy,
birth to death, and forsook partnership because, only because, the risk of
giving birth to company- -permanent company was just too great.

LONERS WHO WANT partners are better off with loners. But if meeting
strangers is difficult for loners, loners are also the most difficult strangers in
the world to meet. Summon every dram of nerve and try a singles bar, a
baseball game, a dance class nonloners, nonloners everywhere. Scan the
personal ads, and you will find phalanxes of nonloners for whom reaching
out is the natural impulse. At parties, spy the loner lurking in the kitchen
pretending to look for ice or napkins, or hovering by the door eager to leave.
The loner at the party tries to appear occupied, peering with sham absorption
at the liquid in her wineglass or the Erte poster next to his solitary post in a
stiff chair no one else wants in the corner farthest from the sound system.
Then again, sometimes it is he who mans the system, changing CDs and
adjusting the volume with such busy efficiency that nobody would think to
interrupt him. When the dancing starts, she freezes. Not a single tendon
betrays the fact that she hears a beat. Not one thumb lifts. As couples rise
and swirl and pound the floor, she vanishes. One way or another, she does.

Loners, if you can catch them, are well worth the trouble. Not dulled by
excess human contact, not blase or focused on your crotch while jabbering
about themselves, loners are curious, vigilant, full of surprises. They do not
cling. Separate wherever they go, awake or asleep, they shimmer with the
iridescence of hidden things seldom seen. The pearl, the swal- low's egg, the
lost doubloon, the jewel in the lotus, membrane. You don't need to be told
this. You know.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA RELATIONSHIP-seminar leader Dr.

Alexander Avila specializes in counseling shy clients. Not all shy people and
around 40 percent of all Americans identify themselves as such-are loners.
Nor are all loners shy. My loner husband, for example, regularly gives
breezy, rousing speeches to roomfuls of potential investors, and has spoken
calmly and wittily to TV reporters. He doesn't do these things unless they're
necessary, but he does them.

But in truth, there is significant overlap between shy people and loners.
Avila's "new definition of shyness" as "a lifeenhancing state of extraordinary
sensitivity and profound self-reflection" also offers food for thought to
loners who don't mind a bit of self-help jargon. In his book The Gift of
Shyness, Avila touts the virtues of shy partners in relationships. Empathic,
never predatory, they share many of the selling points that loners boast, and
for good reason. "Those who date a shy person can be fairly certain that their
partner won't cheat on them,"Avila promises, adding that shy partners "are
the deepest of thinkers" who "excel in the one thing many people lack: the
gift of listening."
Turning his attention directly to "the stay-at-home introvert" who yearns for
a relationship, he warns that reluctance to spend extended time in crowded
public places reduces our chances, statistically, of meeting anyone at all.
Thus, after mustering the first few words of dialogue with an attractive
stranger, this individual will arrange a date recklessly, desperately, jumping
at the chance to get it over with. But a scarcity of past experience and limited
energy for prolonged cruising leaves loners lacking what Avila calls "a
mental measuring stick" with which to judge potential partners. Thus, he
warns, we too often make snap decisions-wrong ones.

"Regardless of how limited your dating opportunities ... the worst thing you
can do is settle for someone who is not your ideal," he writes. When we
spoke, Avila told me how those "worst things" sometimes play out.
Aggressive women sometimes "go after the shy introverted guys," picking
them as prime partners precisely because such guys, whom Avila calls "more
tender and good-hearted" than standard-issue men, seem easier to
manipulate. And a number of such guys have found their way into Avila's
office with black eyes, having been physically abused by their partners.

That's an extreme situation. But it's also an image that lingers in the mind.
Avila has concrete advice for loners seeking relationships: all we need is just
"one really good partner." How to find him or her? Join, he insists. In a way
it's the same dreaded refrain: games, clubs, teams, fraternities.

For loners, "most of the time it's them against the world," says Avila, who
describes himself as shy, but not a loner. If a man's before-dinner grocery run
"is the one time he goes out of the house all day," then the entire pressure of
meeting a potential mate must be borne by those twenty minutes at the local
Piggly Wiggly. As a "grown-up introvert, you may have a natural aversion to
group activities." He proposes a program in which loners keep track of how
many hours they spend each day engaged in "introvert activities (writing,
reading, meditating, eating alone, and relaxing)" and how many in "extravert
activities (going to a dinner party window-shopping at the mall with a
friend)." Those seeking partners should alter the ratio on the program,
ratcheting up the latter type of activities by joining a group that provides an
ongoing social structure larded with lots of available singles.
As any angler knows, fish are most easily caught in stocked ponds, or
aquariums. But loners are not the sort of fish that travel in schools, and we
dislike stocked ponds. Joining is more or less anathema to us. Will all those
dinner parties and trips to the mall with friends make us feel like impostors?
Acting in a way so alien to our true impulses means presenting a false face
to the world and to whichever possible partners we meet in those
surroundings. Pleased to meetyou, I'm not really like this. Is this any way to
start?

STANFORD UNIVERSI'TY's Dr. Lynne Henderson agrees that joining is

the best way to meet possible partners. She also agrees that, for us, it is also
one of the hardest. To her clients at the Shyness Clinic, she recommends
thinking of joining as a means to an end, which she likens to daily bouts with
the Stairmaster.

I can make myself do things I don't want to do, Henderson urges her clients
to tell themselves, in the service of meeting a partner. "I don't like to work
out, either," she concedes, comparing what she calls "social fitness" to
physical fitness. "But I make myself do it." And while physical fitness
requires a lifetime commitment, social fitness needs to last only until that
"one good match" is made. "The search is not forever," Henderson promises.
"Sure, it's a chore." But everyone does chores, so why should loners be
excused?

Reaching goals-such as finding someone who understands your fetish for

wristwatches and bondage-is all about "maximizing your strengths and
minimizing your weaknesses," Henderson says. "People aren't born with
social skills any more than they are born with Ph.D.s in math." Both take
brains and diligence. "If you want something badly enough," Henderson
reasons, "you can be strategic about it."

Sometimes this means just asking for help. "Introverts often have very good
friends. And good friends tend to be good matchmakers. Do your friends
know anyone you might like? Just ask."

Returning to the exercise metaphor, she notes that "not everybody's a tennis
player." Others are squash players or water-polo players, so to speak. Thus
relationship-seeking loners ought to choose groups very selectively, she
advises, based on activities or principles they already enjoy "even if you've
never thought of them as group activities." This helps to squelch that self-
betraying, false-face sensation. If you like hiking but usually hike alone,
Henderson says, it wouldn't kill you to join the local hiking club. If you've
always wanted to learn Hindi, enroll in a class rather than buying a set of
learn-athome cassettes. Readers' and writers' groups offer unique forums, she
says, for members whose hobbies are all about being alone. She calls this
process "niche-picking." It makes being in a group bearable even if only
just-by making the group structure a by-product of the main action. Being
already well-versed in that action before you join the group "can be so
advantageous," she adds, "because then you're the expert, and everyone will
come to you. And if you're willing to help them, even just a little"- well, that
makes you all the more attractive, Henderson says. And it's less of a
workout.

BUT THE INTERNET makes that workout even easier. All comprising the
written word, all in the privacy of your own home, on your own time--it
creates a comfort level for which loners attempting to meet one another in an
earlier era would have given their left arms. For those who, no matter what
the shrinks advise, would rather die than join Toastmasters, the touch of a
keyboard and the soft glow of a screen are magic and power beyond
imagining. The bedroom light goes off. Taptaptaptaptap. Countless matches,
emotional and erotic, have been made online-and even if many of these
bonds simmer in cyberspace forever and never progress to the skin stage,
that's fine with some of the loners involved. ("It's in person that the real
issues come out," Alexander Avila warns.) Being able to speak from the
heart or, okay, from a bit farther down without being seen lends loners a
directness that standard social games deny us. Our voices, which in times
past would perforce have been confined to diaries or silence, now shout and
whisper and croon across the blue. A host of electronic angels, the Internet
lifts away our shame and hesitance, the smiley or blank masks we wear in
public, all the fear and boredom small talk forces us to feel. Stripped of our
gags, wrists untied, we relax into natural postures and start signaling to one
another at the speed of light.

In chat rooms and on-line bulletin boards, the subculture emerges, defining
itself and its preferences as it could never do in a public sphere. "I pick men
who are very comfortable being loners," one young woman confides on a
girl-talk bulletin board. "I don't mind the separation between our moments
together." "Single, attractive male seeks sexy, loner hippie chick," reads a
personals ad in the Missoula, Montana Independent's online edition, "who
thinks it's cool to live and be free." "Cynical queer loner, thirty-two, recently
committed to polygamy," reads a posting on a gay Web site from a man who
seeks a new partner and really means polyandry, but warns, "I will not be
willing to spend every waking minute of my life with you." At a heavy-
metal Web site, a woman seeks "long-haired guys ... loners. No Christians."
Another listing on the same site specifies a desire for "goths, loners." At a
Web site seeking male pen-pals, "Sandra" calls herself "a loner, a bit shy, but
very open-minded. I have a high sex drive and I enjoy all sports and I'm
extremely athletic." So many sites are dedicated to special interests from
Lord of the Rings to Indonesian lepidoptera to yaws, not to mention
autocastration- that like minds are only ever a click or two away.

On-line dating services direct special appeals to loners in general. The home-
page text of a French one begins with: "Attention, senior managers, stressed-
out fortysomethings and loners tired of being alone." Another site, called
Solo for Singles, welcomes new users by reasoning that "true loners often
seek safety by staying away from people. If they don't even work with
numerous people, they will have a hard time sharing experiences with
someone who is attractive to them and vice versa."

Even the word "cybersex" has the self-consciously sci-fi shiver of something
from a Philip K. Dick novel. Yet the future is here. Unsolicited porn --sexual
spam accounted for as much as 8 percent of all email traffic in the summer
of 2002. Hooking up with a live human being, albeit unseen, to spin on-line
fantasies is easy and costs nothing. Whether those fantasies are the garden-
variety touch-me-lick-me type or travel down some fetish corridor, they
make it possible for raving, heaving ecstasy between two---or more-partners
to remain a technically solitary pursuit, performed in the utmost privacy, the
small closed circle of the self. A lot of loners can tolerate only this. It seems,
in one sense, simple. And so clean. You're home. You aren't hurting anyone.
You're only looking.

Cybersex is masturbation with a twist. Porn sites and sexual chat rooms have
done more for loners than any of us want to admit.
It is here that the public's fear of loners-that primal what-ishe-doing-in-there
fear breeds at its hottest and smears the most poison. The worst he could be
"doing in there," after all, is something that blends sex with the bizarre, sex
with what must at all costs remain hidden. The world waits, outside the room
of every loner, to break down the door and catch him in the act.

A Web site aimed at helping parents protect their kids from cyberstalkers
explains patiently that even "before the advent of the Internet, pedophiles
were essentially loners"-thus, now, shielded from easy detection by the Net's
anonymity, they can pursue their prey with impunity. In a 2000 UPI article, a
psychologist calls the Net "a trap for people seeking sex." It is "the crack
cocaine of sex addiction," Dr. Alyson Nerenberg goes on to explain. Having
"treated people who spend 10 to 15 hours with their computers daily seeking
sex partners," Nerenberg declares that "these people are often loners who
have drifted away from all other human contact" and thus "have to have
more and more" cybersex. An S/M Web site warns its users against
"predators.... They come in all shapes, sizes, and ethnic backgrounds . . .
although the majority are white males between the ages of 18 and 35. They
are usually loners."

IT IS HARDLY possible to even think of cybersex without imagining the

solitary onanist angling his body slightly so as to avoid spraying the screen,
the keyboard, the mouse and mousepad. The rise of cybersex electrifies the
masturbating-loner archetype, but the archetype was already set in stone by
the time Edison a loner invented the lightbulb. It's so obvious. The image of
the loner as compulsive masturbator is a projection born of the public's
bafflement at how we could possibly be spending so much time alone. What
else could we possibly be doing?

Masturbation, like the loners with whom it is so ubiquitously associated, has

a bad rap. In films from Being There to There's Something About May,
masturbation is joke fodder. This, of course, is because it is a solitary
practice. Things done alone are mysterious, dangerous, wrong, shameful,
incomplete. In the eyes of the world, they do not count. On the sexual-
options coolness scale, it ranks pretty much at the bottom, barely above
bestiality.
"Masturbation has never been highly regarded," laments Joani Blank, who
founded Good Vibrations, San Francisco's innovative sex-toy store, in 1977.
Her own string of books, including I Am My Loner and First Person Sexual,
have established Blank as self-pleasuring's most passionate pioneer. Most
people, she explains, do not see it as an end in itself, or anything to boast
about or even as "having sex." (Woody Allen, to his credit, has called it "sex
with someone you love.")

"If there is only one `right' way to have an orgasm," says Blank, who is a
longtime sex educator but not a loner herself, "please let me know what the
`wrong' way is. I believe there is no such thing." For her anthology First
Person Sexual, she asked a wide variety of men and women to write about
their own experiences: not about the fantasies that got them off, but the acts
themselves. Out came tales of lubricant and candles. But many contributors
were unable to write about this except in the third person---A la"his hand
flew up and down" and "she reached for the photograph of Ewan
McGregor." Blank went through and changed all those pronouns to "me,"
"I," and "my" hence the book's title "and in every case it made the writer feel
much better."

IN ITS PREMIER issue, the alternative-lifestyle journal To-Do List

introduced a whole new typology, and a tongue-twisting brand name for it:
the quirkyalone.

"We are the puzzle pieces who seldom fit with other puzzle pieces," wrote
the magazine's editor, Sasha Cagen, in the issue's lead article. "We inhabit
singledom as our natural resting state.... Secretly, we are romantics,
romantics of the highest order. We want a miracle. Out of millions we have
to find the one who will understand.

"For the quirkyalone, there is no patience for dating just for the sake of not
being alone. On a fine but by no means transcendent date we dream of going
home to watch television. We would prefer to be alone with our own
thoughts than with a less than perfect fit. We are almost constitutionally
incapable of casual relationships." As for whether "being a quirkyalone is a
life sentence, I say yes, at the core, one is always quirkyalone. But when the
quirkyalone collides with another, ooh la la. The earth quakes." After the
article was reprinted in The Utne Reader, Cagen became a sought-after
media pundit, interviewed widely on the subject of "deeply single" singles-
seekers of love who aren't desperate to date merely for the sake of dating.

The speed with which her concept was understood and absorbed dispels
once again the stereotype of unsexy loners. Dispels it, at least, for
alternative-lifestyle types. The masses whose flesh crawls at the word
alternative are still happy with their conviction that anything done alone is at
best not worth doing, at worst a sin. The Church reveals its antiloner bias by
reviling masturbation. An old boyfriend of a friend of mine used to call her-
they lived hundreds of miles apart to confess, crying, that he had jerked WE
I did it again, he moaned. She would yawn. It was three in the morning, her
time. So?

So tell me it was wrong, he wept.

No, my friend said. Hang up and do it again.

He would get furious. He wanted her to help him correct what he could see
only as a flaw in himself, wash the sin from himself. She would not help. He
broke up with her and started sleeping with other girls. A sin, too, but one he
could brag about. A sin that drew him out of solitude, which was a greater
sin, and brought his penis out into the world, where it could proudly join the
crowd.
7.
power surge
[TECHNOLOGY]
It made shepherds into steelworkers and forced loners to become factory
drones. And now it's payback time.

N A JUNE day in 1865, eighteen-year-old Mollie Faucher was

disembarking from a Brooklyn trolley car that began to roll again before she
had quite stepped off. She fell. Her long skirt snared in the machinery of the
car, which proceeded to drag Faucher down the street.

Doctors would proclaim her remarkably lucky. Surviving the ordeal, Fancher
suffered broken ribs but, as far as the physicians who examined her could
tell, no more serious injury. They reassured her that she would recover fully
in time for her imminent wedding.

But this was not to be. After the accident, days turned into weeks as Faucher
lay in bed complaining of horrific symptoms: blindness and paralysis and
semiconscious stupors. Now and then a fit of spasms wrenched her body into
a hoop shape before leaving her limp again. Insisting that her appetite had
vanished, she firmly refused food. The former star student and skilled
horsewoman would stay in bed for fifty years, the rest of her life. Fancher
would never join the outside world again.

Dubbed "The Brooklyn Enigma," Fancher made headlines. Reporters

marveled at her ability to read, embroider, write in a fine, tiny penmanship,
and fashion intricate wax flowers, although blind. They marveled, too, as
years went by, over her claim that she no longer needed to eat. Widely
admired for having the good grace to unhinge her young fiance from his
obligation, Fancher welcomed visitors to her dark bedroom. She had become
a lifelong recluse, never going out into daylight again.

MOLLIE FANCHER WAS a celebrity, but she was far from unique. In the
latter half of the nineteenth century, middle-class young female invalids
were so numerous in Britain and America that there was a collective term for
them: "bed cases." Doctors were all too familiar with the range of
complaints that included headaches, feebleness, paralysis, contortions,
trances, fainting spells, blindness, deafness, and muteness--and which
resolutely eluded any diagnosis, any evident cause. Confined to their
bedrooms for life, arguably by choice, these celibate odalisques comprised a
veritable subculture. Writing in 1883, physician G. L. Austin called such
patients duplicitous and "unreasonable." Speaking up for many in his
profession, Austin accused these women of exaggerating their symptoms and
of exhibiting an inability to perform certain tasks only when it suited them.
As Michelle Stacey reports in her book The Fasting Girl, one classic bed
case of the period was Alice James, sister of the writers Henry and William
James. In 1866, at eighteen, Alice first began complaining of headaches and
eventually, Stacey writes, "ended up devoting her life to her illnesses."

James herself called her illnesses "nervous crises." It is a telling description.

The ideas of "nervous disease," neurosis and hysteria had been in circulation
for some time; and while nineteenth-century doctors no longer believed, as
their ancient Greek forebears did, that such ailments sprang from a
misplaced uterus (hystera), they speculated widely on the likelihood that
these patients' symptoms had deeper emotional roots than physical ones.

In the ensuing years, the debate has been joined by sociologists, feminist
scholars, and others. Why, they wonder, did debilitation and thus-and this is
what matters to lonersseclusion become fashionable? It seems a sad fashion,
denying its practitioners freedom and fun. Yet it also freed them from adult
responsibilities. Becoming an invalid was one way to escape the marriage
market or, if wed, the nuptial bed. Mollie Panther's case is an example of
this. But why would sex and marriage suddenly seem unendurable? Neither
of them were all that different in the nineteenth century than they had ever
been before.

Other things were, though. Other aspects of young ladies' lives were
speeding futureward at such unprecedented warpspeed that they resembled a
Jules Verne novel. Sparking this change was technology.

Like mushrooms under a tree, innovations appeared one by one to instantly,

and forever, change the once-familiar structure of human society. Between
1840 and 1879 alone, these included the electric telegraph, the telephone, the
lightbulb, the transcontinental railroad, and the passenger elevator. Tasks that
had been taken for granted since the dawn of civilization were suddenly no
longer required, or were performed in utterly new ways. Tasks that had
always been performed by human flesh were taken over by machines.
Motion and light and time and space and talk, and thus reality itself,
morphed radically within a single generation: Mollie Fancher's generation.
Thrust over a threshold more dazzling-but also more disorientingthan had
ever been crossed before, some were thrilled. But some were frightened.
And for the frightened, coping with those changes meant hiding from them.

That Fancher met her fate while riding public transportation seems a plot
point worthy of a novelist: the future rushing to meet a bright young woman
and knocking her, literally, off her feet. The accident and Faucher's chosen
response to it allowed her to dodge those aspects of the new world that
seemed beyond handling. Slipping away, bed cases refused to grow up,
choosing instead the finite, low-tech landscapes of their vanished
childhoods-and of the world's vanished childhood. In a buzzers-and-bells era
too new to have any points of reference, they found refuge under the covers,
in their own rooms, alone.

At first glance it seems only too appropriate to include a discussion of

Victorian invalids in a book about loners. Bed cases were the ultimate loners
right?

Well, no. They adopted the habits of loners, the guise of loners, as it suited
them. Mollie Fancher was by all accounts sociable. Even bundled up in bed
she entertained a stream of visitors. Look closely. In retreat, hiding from the
plugged-in world, a bed case was the vortex in a whirl of doctors, relatives,
well-wishers, all fluttering around the helpless shut-in. Faces always hovered
over the bed facilitating therapies, feedings, entertainment, hygiene. This
was a flight not into independence, as true loners might make, but into
dependence. To call bed cases loners, as seems customary now, is to insult
loners. It misses the point entirely.

TECHNOLOGY ITSELF IS neutral. Whether it works for evil or good,

distinctions which themselves are in the eye of the beholder, depends on who
is flicking the switch. Its very impartiality is its most terrifying aspect, but
also its best.

Technology has existed, in some form or another, since humans first used
rocks to brain their prey. That the Industrial Revolution is called a revolution
is only because it saw the birth of so much industry technology all at one
time. It changed the paradigms of speed and distance, manufacture and
communication. In changing life, it changed work.

And what does work mean for loners? For some, the smart and lucky ones
who work alone, it means accomplishing things without being made to
suffer. Simple as it should be, no loner can take this point for granted. Along
with whatever other hardships work brings- -difficulty, danger, dullness,
unfair pay loners who labor any way besides alone endure one more. It is a
hardship nonloners don't even know exists, cannot conceive of.

How much time spent with others is too much? Side by side, within their
sight, in earshot forty minutes? Two hours, tops. Yet today's standard work
shift lasts eight. Putting loners in busy workplaces all day is like making
albinos pick cotton without sunscreen. The Industrial Revolution turned
work into more of a crowd scene than it had ever been before. Loners
needed to make a living like everyone else. It was presumed that they must
join the mob that was the workforce. A presumption, yet a punishment.

A preindustrial village is a kind of fishbowl: small and confined, its

occupants few and familiar. Even the least solitary jobs in that almost-
entirely-vanished world demand contact only with relatives and friends, not
hordes of strangers. Jesus worked in Joseph's carpenter shop.

With the rise of industry, farms gave way to meatpacking plants. Smithies
gave way to steelworks. In so doing, the average workplace expanded
exponentially. In factories, the average worker was surrounded by row on
row of other workers, often for brutally long shifts. In 1836, one British
cotton manufacturer lamented: "Since Lord Althorp's Act was passed in
1833, we have reduced the time of adults to sixty-seven and a half hours a
week, and that of children under thirteen years of age to forty-eight hours in
the week, though to do this latter has, I must admit, subjected us to much
inconvenience."
As economic centers shifted from countryside to city, crowding became
status quo. Dickens was not the only writer who railed against the misery
that came with the brand-new metropolis: infectious disease, dirty air,
accidents, murder, madness. The very technology that made life faster,
brighter, and better in general made the lives of those who ran its machines
hell. But writers decrying slums and factories do not mourn the special
misery, the added agony, that such conditions visited on loners. Who,
lamenting typhoid, smog, and amputations, would add to those ills too much
company?

T1;CHNOLOGY CREATED CITIES. Some had flourished for thousands of

years; some sprang from the land like Athena from her father's head, fully
formed. Social critics have always blasted urban anonymity. And in those
days about which Dickens wrote, living in cities meant sharing rooms,
sharing beds -not with lovers but with siblings, strangers, coworkers because
a shared room might have just one mattress. Privacy was not an option.

But as cities developed and society learned to accommodate itself around the
industries that fueled them, living standards changed. With the twentieth
century, it became possible for the average worker to live alone--men at first,
later women as well. Previously, living solo had been the province only of
rich lords and pariahs. But metropolises spawned the perfectly respectable
studio apartment, ubiquitous and cheap, with room enough for only one.
With this change, cities became their own kind of paradise for loners. In the
very anonymity critics derided lay the privacy loners have always craved. In
cities, unlike villages, the never-ending swarm of souls and wheels and
sounds renders residents circumspect. City people are as a rule less curious
about strangers than country folk. They do not strike up con versations so
quickly. Knowing few of their neighbors, if any, city people are simply not
all that interested in whoever lives down the hall or downstairs. Anonymity
makes people stick to their own business. Thus, thanks to technology, the
urban loner has emerged and flourished over the last hundred years. Toting
our groceries and daily mail in and out of Apartment 2C unwatched, free, we
have slipped out of the fishbowl into the sea.

Hom1: LIFE is one thing. But the workplace, even as it diversified from
factory to office and to the other urban fixtures, banks and big stores,
remained crowded. The twentieth century firmly established offices as the
mainstay of middle-class work. Replicated endlessly around the world with
numbing regularity, cubicle upon cubicle, floor upon floor of tower upon
tower, the corporate world works like the beehive it resembles. In the
corporate system, teamwork wins.

On my first day at one of the two offices where I have worked, a cake was
brought into the kitchenette for the birthday of a woman in a different
department. An announcement was made on the PA system. All around me,
my new colleagues rose and headed for the kitchenette. I stayed right where
I was, wanting to appear dedicated and complete my project for that day.
Down the hall I could hear singing and laughter, the clink of a knife. One of
my ofpicemates, having noticed I wasn't in the kitchenette, came back to
fetch me.

"Office rule," she said. "We always make a showing when it's someone's
birthday. Everybody. Always."

Taking a solitary tray to a quiet corner of the employee canteen is not quite
cricket. Interviewed for Newsday, a loner who worked for a public-relations
firm, a highly sociable office in a highly sociable field, lamented that "being
in such an environment has caused me to be deeply depressed. Much of this
has to do with extroverts' feelings toward quiet types and their tendency to
ostracize."

For outgoing types such as Joani Blank, founder of the San Francisco sex-
toy store Good Vibrations, no office environment can be busy or social
enough. Blank told me she adores meetings, even those that go on for hours
with everyone talking at once. For her, this is the very definition of work
well done.

"When someone wants to end the meeting and says, `Let's just go home and
sleep on it,"' Blank told me, "I feel completely shut down. I feel rejected.
Turning my key in the lock of my door at home, I already feel lonely."

DESPITE THE FRIENDSHIPS that sometimes sprout there, offices are

artificial societies. Millions of these false societies, self-governing short-
term civilizations with their own rules and hierarchies, are in constant flux at
any given time. They shift in both dynamics and population with every new
hire, every layoff. They end abruptly, crashing down in a hail of pink slips.
Yet as liquid as they are, as potentially loveless, these are the surroundings in
which a great many working adults spend a great majority of their waking
hours. Imagine a white-collar worker on his deathbed. Looking back at
images of his life unspooling before his inner eye, he realizes how much of
his time, what a huge percentage, has been spent alongside people he would
never have chosen to know. He hears thirty years' worth of trivialities, How
about those Seahawks? against the remembered bloop of the watercooler.
How awful to think of deathbed scenes at all. But, for loners, instructional.

Formulas for creating a successful twentieth-century workplace have no

room for the loner. Exemplifying this, an article in Business Solutions
magazine is subtitled "Loners Beware." In the article, a CEO explains her
company's hiring policy: "We look for employees who have been involved in
group activities (be it church events or intramural sports teams) in their
personal lives." The office's ambience, the CEO adds happily, "would drive a
loner crazy. We encourage teamwork and brainstorming." To further ensure a
sociable staff, "we hire mostly on personal references ... our star performers
were hired because they're friends of friends."

In an on-line interview, the CEO of a Web applications development

company declares that his strategy is to "avoid admitted loners. Singles or
workers with few friends, little family nearby and no social life ... while it's
illegal to ask about family or personal issues," he says he gets around this by
asking applicants about their hobbies or what they do for fun. "The fact that
they have some sort of support group outside work is good," he explains. "It
gives us some measure if they're sociable or not."

An article in an industry journal by a Canadian orthodontist offers tips on

maximizing a clinic's profitability by enforcing a vigorous team mentality.
He compares good workers to squirrels who scurry around together stashing
nuts in summer as preparation for winter. "Everyone is working toward a
shared goal.... [Thus] I would much rather hire an inexperienced team player
than a super-competent and experienced loner. The lone squirrel may
provide for itself but won't do much toward the good of the group. Ironically,
the competent loner can mess up the whole team."
Applying another animal metaphor, he encourages what he calls "goose
behavior": "Geese are noisy. How come? They're cheering each other on! ...
How about naming an `employee of the moment' for a particularly positive
or outrageous act of caring? Such recognition can be just as motivating and
satisfying to a team member as a raise in salary." A worker's best reward, he
writes, is "a sense of belonging."

With this in mind, he advises other employers, "Keep score."

SAVVY NONLONERS START networking during their college days,

honing the social skills that loners often find ridiculous. For not having a
clue, loners pay a price and keep on paying. My father learned this firsthand.
He had dreamed as a boy of becoming a veterinarian or oceanographer, both
relatively solitary scientific professions demanding only a bare minimum of
human contact. But World War II derailed his plans. In the army as a
member of the Signal Corps, he learned enough about electronics to feel,
when the war ended, that he would be better off with an engineering degree
in a year or so than starting from square one in veterinary school or
oceanography. He became a cog in the vast cold war aerospace industry. It
meant working in a busy office, consulting constantly with fel low
engineers, and traveling nationwide to other complexes, consulting with
their engineers. He liked the science, liked the instruments, the satellites on
which he worked. Hated the Christmas parties and obligatory cocktails with
coworkers. During a business trip to Cape Canaveral in 1986, he spent that
cocktail hour longing to get away from his officemates and the astronaut
they had invited along. As they drank and chatted, showing one another
snapshots of their families, my father could barely contain his desire to flee.
Later, after the astronaut died aboard the doomed space shuttle Challenger,
my father would always remember with a guilty shudder that evening's
desire, a loner's wish.

By being a man on the cutting edge of technology who began his career
precisely in the middle of the twentieth century, he was destined to have, in
spades, both what he loved and hated most. Solar cells, satellites, and fifty
years of being sandwiched between other people's desks.

Generations of loners like him have endured this agony and irony: adoring
the work but despising the workplace.
Yet at the end of the twentieth century-something happened. Loners found a
way to make technology rescue them from the cage it had created.

THE INTERNET IS, for loners, an absolute and total miracle. It is, for us,
the best invention of the last millennium. It educates. It entertains. It
transforms. It facilitates a kind of dialogue in which we need not be seen, so
it suits us perfectly. It validates. It makes being alone seem normal. It makes
being alone fun fbr everyone.

And so it has its critics. They claim it keeps kids from playing healthy games
outdoors. They say it is a procurer for perverts, a weapon in hate crimes.
Underlying all this, of course, is the real reason for their dismay: the Internet
legitimizes solitude. The real problem is not that kids don't play outdoors,
but that they do not play with other kids.

Terror is afoot of a sci-fi world in which machines have rendered social

contact undesirable and, desired or not, obsolete. In 2000, the Stanford
Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society released the results of a newly
completed research project. It revealed that one fourth of those interviewed
for the project who used the Internet more than five hours a week (and thus
were, by SIQSS's definition, "regular users") reported that they spent less
time socializing outside the house or being with family or friends than they
had done before discovering the Net. This percentage led the researchers to
conclude that the Internet is an isolating technology that separates users from
the "real world." Subsequently, a study conducted at UCLA found that a
majority of its participants did not spend less time with others.

The Stanford study made Internet users look bad, backing up that assessment
by saying See? They spend more time ALONE. Its UCLA counterpart made
loners look bad, too, by saying Hooray! Internet users still spend time with
others. Both studies sparked heated commentary. Either we should all panic
because Internet use is creating a world of hermits, the commentators
seemed to say in the first case, or, in the second, that we should all celebrate
because Internet use is not creating a world of hermits. Global Reach
magazine, for one, was dismayed that the mainstream media "favored the
UCLA study over Stanford's, discarding the notion that Net use creates
loners and workaholics."
That this issue attained such a high profile at all is troubling. Who cares
whether Net users behave like loners? Commentators never spew fire over
the fact that offices force loners to act like nonloners. It is the specter of
loner behavior, like a plague, that strikes terror across the land. Our friend
the Internet, neutral as all technology, has done-not of its own volition, as it
has none the same thing that crime reporters have, and profilers, and witch-
hunters. It has kindled that age-old panic which shows itself at every chance
it gets: fear of loners.

THE NET HAS turned hanging around the house into a wild adventure, has
made school a snap. But, most radically of all, it has changed work.

Whether or not the Net has rendered socializing obsolete and so what if it
has?-no one can deny that millions of jobs around the world need no longer
be performed in offices but anywhere a laptop goes. In other words, at long
last, the worker can work alone. This is a giant leap in evolution, an
Emancipation Proclamation for loners. We call it paradise, they call it
telecommuting.

On average, American telecommuters in 1997 worked at home some fifteen

hours per week. Nearly 20 percent worked at home full-time. In 1999, the
workforce reportedly included 20 million telecommuters. In 2002 at a time
when over 51 percent of North American companies offered their workers
telecommuting as an option -a study by the Cahners In-Stat market research
group revealed that about 24 percent of the American workforce, more than
30 million employees, spent at least part of every workweek telecommuting
from home. The study predicted that this number would grow to nearly 30
percent of the workforce nearly 40 million workers by 2004.

Thirty million, the 2002 figure, is a significant increase over the 20 million
American telecommuters reported in 1999. It is nearly ten times the 3.6
million telecommuters identified in a 1997 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
survey. (Another survey, also completed that year, reported 11. 1 million
telecommuters.) The Internet can take major credit for this increase, in
which the 1997 figure represented a growth of almost 90 percent over the
findings in a comparable 1991 survey.
As for its efficacy, studies show increased productivity among
telecommuting employees ranging from 8 percent to as much as 30 percent.
Among loners, increased productivity is all well and good. But it's the
advent of work situations that don't require us to sell our souls that really
matters.

NOT ALL LONERS are creative, nor are all creative people loners. But the
overlap between the two is too large to be mere coincidence. Much has been
written about the fact that children who spend a great deal of time alone tend
to be more imaginative than their socially active peers. And while Freud
dismissed imagination as escapist and infantile, he would hardly have
enjoyed a world devoid of art, music, theater, and books. As artists know, the
creative process is consummately singular. It is a sojourn whose signposts
are legible only to the sojourner, and are often cryptic even to him: a trip
whose personal nature is its point. Those born creative tend either to be born
loners or to become loners, early, knowing it will fuel the flame that is their
raison d'etre. Down the years, how many loners have been called upon to be
creative in cramped cubicles, coworkers on all sides, phones jingling and
shoes scuffling a partition away? Thinking of them means thinking of how
many masterpieces were not written, how much cleverness or discovery died
before it could ever see the light of day.

Not having to be in any given place at any given time, to perform under
watchful eyes, allows for a shift of staggering proportions. Demands having
been removed from the body, the mind breaks free.

The eventual implications of such a shift are hard to anticipate and even to
imagine, in terms of ideas and achievement and personal happiness and, not
inconsequently, fortunes. Carnegie Mellon University economics professor
Richard Florida sees these massive changes coalescing with the rise of what
he calls the "Creative Class." Numbering some 38 million members in 2002,
by Florida's calculations, this class represents a full third of the nation's
workforce. And what Florida calls "the creative ethos" has, unsurprisingly,
much in common with the loner ethos.

In the emerging "Creative Age," as he puts it, creative output is the most
highly prized commodity. It is "the decisive source of competitive advantage
. . . the winners in the long run are those who can create and keep creating."
Thus, Florida writes, "schedules, rules, and dress codes have become more
flexible to cater to how the creative process works."

Members of the Creative Class "do not want to conform to organizational or

institutional directives and resist traditional group-oriented norms."
"Creative Class Values" include individuality, self-statement, self-
determination, and meritocra- cy---in which producing good work is more
important than making a particularly good impression. All of these are loner
territory. The Creative Class's lifestyle is experiential, its achievements
fueled and inspirations sparked by being out of the office and in the world,
observing it. Nice work if a loner can get it.

FLORIDA CITES A study showing that the amount of free time Americans
spent socializing with others dropped from 8.2 hours per week in 1965 to 7.3
in 1995-a shift of nearly 20 percent. Given the years in question, this change
was clearly fueled not only by the Internet but also other diversions, most of
them technological. TV and videos along with computers are relentlessly
blamed for dissembling society.

What are loners to make of the presumption the message in all that fretting-
that a less sociable world is automatically a worse one? That free time spent
socializing with others is automatically superior to time spent in other ways?
When headlines say Internet U.rers Spend More Time Alone it is not just a
comment but a wail, a banshee heralding a death. What if a certain girl
spends her time on-line studying the life cycle of lung moths while the girl
next door spends her social time sharing a crack pipe with the boarder? Or
even, say, sitting on the porch with Kate and Morgan talking about nothing
for hours? Is socializing all that great? Riots are socializing. Arguably, more
damage is done and time wasted in company with others than alone.

Technology has merely made this obvious. The fact that loners and
nonloners alike would rather plug in than talk or touch suggests that
everyone is finally getting wise to how nice it can feel to be alone. How
much they can achieve or, even the most passive of them, see. How many
realities lie a click away. It is dangerous wisdom.

Whether or not technology entices nonloners to act like Loners is, for loners,
less important than what it can do for us. It makes possible work, play, even
relationships that would never have happened otherwise.

Our loner ancestors lived in forest cottages, were woodsmen, shepherds,

solitary seamstresses, fur trappers. Some, chasing heaven, were hermits.
Now the world is too full -of buildings and people, buildings full of people-
for us to finesse those kinds of refuge. History is like this. Having led us to
the city, having made the city swell and swarm, making us stay, technology
offers a latter-day escape. An escape from itself a sort of Chinese-puzzle
irony. Cars are caves on wheels. And the keyboard is a forest, is a meadow,
is the open sea, a habitable planet, a pot of gold, an island, the palace where
the prince is looking for a princess, Shangri-la, the Serengeti, Swedish
lessons twenty-four hours a day.
8.
the diving bell
[ART]
Inspiration comes to those who know how to be silent, how to wait, how to
translate the ineable. Sound like anyone you know?

IN VALENTINE'S DAY in 1937, the New York Times ran an article

about the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.

Munch "was recently persuaded, with great difficulty, to exhibit his work in
London," ran the article, explaining that the painter "considered by many to
be Norway's greatest artist ... lives the life of a recluse near Oslo."

"The large country house in which the artist lives his secluded life has only
two residential rooms. The rest of the building is given over to workshops
and storerooms filled with packing cases and pictures that Mr. Munch
declines to sell. The old artist paints in a roofless barn, with long grass
instead of a floor, underfoot. Only two persons may intrude upon him, one a
shipping agent, and the other Pola Gaugin, son of the famous painter. Some
time ago, however, Professor Dorner, head of the Landesmuseum in Hanover
and an admirer of Munch's work, managed to pay a call.

" `Mr. Munch hates all contact with the outside world,' Professor Dorner
relates. `It took several days trying to get in touch with him, but at last I
managed to coax him not only to consent to see me but also to show his
pictures at the London Gallery.

"`He is old and ill but paints all the time. He never answers letter; piles of
correspondence are heaped on a desk in one of the rooms."'

Munch is most famous for his 1893 work The Scream, in which a figure
standing on a bridge, head in hands, fixes the viewer with a wide-eyed,
openmouthed gaze at once imploring and anguished as two top-hatted
pedestrians stroll nearby with apparent unconcern. In Munch's own words, it
was inspired by "a breath of melancholy" that swept through the artist one
day at sunset when the sky turned blood red "and I sensed a great, infinite
scream pass through nature." That preternatural scream, of' course, was one
which no one else on earth could hear.

AR'r[sTS H1?AR WHAT no one else hears. They see what no one else sees.
They say what no one else says. They must. And to do this, they traffic in
the slippery yield of their own souls. They bring to earth the wrack and lode
of depths that only they can reach and still come back alive.

Inspiration is a flash. A momentary flicker that-if the wouldbe recipient is

mired in mindless chatter might easily die unseen. It cannot be repeated,
duplicated, slowed down, cached for viewing at some more convenient time.
The mind awaiting inspiration must be primed, ever awake, aware. For this it
is best off alone.

She is gifted, they say. She has the gift. A gift with hard labor attached. After
inspiration must come the plunge down inner passages, the search which
suffocates but liberates: the spelunking where no one could help even if you
wanted them to. Instead, plucking souvenirs from those depths, you must
keep asking yourself, in a tongue only you can speak, What next? But how?
while shapes and colors swirl out of control. A gift, but a subpoena.

Which can take weeks to fulfill. Years. Your whole life.

Which requires initiative. Commitment. Loner values, loner aptitudes.

Conviction that something so personal is worth doing no matter what. No
matter if they try to talk you out of it. No matter if they call you self-
indulgent, talentless. They will. No matter-all the better-that it is best done
alone, some would say only done alone. No matter if they do not understand.
Deluded, they think you are doing this for them. Sillies. Edvard Munch
refused for many years to sell or even show his paintings anywhere. He saw
no cause to share.

Art breeds loners. Loners breed art.

IN A LETTER TO his brother, Michelangelo is said to have written, "I have

no friends of any sort and I don't want any." Leonardo da Vinci swore by
solitude as the road to wisdom and artistic perfection. In company, he is said
to have once declared, "only half of you will belong to yourself." Paul
Cezanne was a recluse in his hometown, Aix, where he devoted himself to
painting studies of nearby Mont Sainte-Victoire. Pierre Bonnard was a
contemporary of Matisse and Monet but, loner that he was, honed a style
wholly apart from the popular movements of his time as he painted his
beloved wife, Marthe, in luminous tones again and again. Edgar Degas
painted pretty ballerinas but always went home alone; he is said never to
have had a love affair all his life. Pablo Picasso, despite his numerous love
affairs and several marriages, was a self-described loner as well. Gustav
Klimt rendered pairs of lovers with a whimsical sensitivity far ahead of his
time; his sister wrote of him that "like all artists, he also needed a lot of love
... he was not naturally gregarious but a loner, and it therefore had to be the
duty of his brothers and sisters to eliminate all the little things in his daily
life that were inconvenient.... We understood his silent coming and going....
Once he had gathered strength, he would plunge into his work with such
vehemence that we often thought the flames of his genius might consume
him alive." The list goes on: Jean Dubuffet. Ford Madox Brown. Charles
Schulz. Georgia O'Keeffe lived in isolation in New Mexico, far from artistic
and intellectual circles, and drove Southwestern backroads solo in a Model
A Ford with its backseat removed so that she could paint in the car. A
biography of Andy Warhol is tellingly titled Loner at the Ball.

EVIDENCE SAYS ARTISTIC talent is inborn, a genetic trait. Any

kindergarten teacher can see that some five-year-olds draw and paint and
sculpt better than the rest of the class---that they love it and apply
themselves to it. It matters to them. Whether those five-year-olds grow up to
be professional artists or even adopt art as a hobby depends largely on
environment: whether adults encourage them, whether they have access to
art supplies, whether they exist in a time and place that let them pursue art.
The skill is inborn-my old boyfriend Jan was a brilliant cartoonist, drawing
at a professional level even in tenth grade. He soared through every art class
at school. He won prizes. But Jan's parents did everything they could to
discourage him. They told him art was unimportant. They ignored his
awards. Worst of all, in his senior year of high school, when he should have
been applying to colleges, his parents refused to pay for his education if he
studied art. He joined the air force instead after a recruiter told him he could
earn an art degree in the service and join a mural-painting outfit at the base.
That recruiter tricked Jan. He was shunted into clerical work.

After finishing the service, he became a hospital clerk, his dreams of

becoming the next Robert Crumb long since shattered. Yet Jan still drew. He
did not have the fight in him to go against his parents, apply for an art-school
scholarship, a student loan. Years in the military crushed part of him, and he
did not draw as much as he might have done in happier days, when he had
hope. Yet still he drew. He draws now. That was never wrested from him,
could not be.

Artistic temperament is not a choice. Jan suffered for his. And it means
being aware, from the time one discovers that other people exist, that other
people do not see things as one does. Sometimes it seems that other people
all see things alike, and that however everyone else sees things it is not as
one does. It startles the young artist at first the first few times he is told walls
are not for drawing on, that mashed potatoes are not clay, that horses are not
blue. In time he realizes, Oh, I'm on my own with this. My visions can't be
shared or discussed in mixed company. And if I try to talk about them,
someone might laugh or shake her head uncomprehendingly or try to make
me stop. Someone might hurt me.

With that epiphany comes the shock of realizing that there is an inside and
an outside, and the artist is outside. Not by will. By blood. By a force
beyond understanding, no more mutable than the fact that one breathes. A
shock. The knowledge that one is alone in the world. Alone in mind, in
mission if not in flesh. All alone, neither able to answer to any boss besides
oneself nor willing. Forever alone, a thrill and an awesome responsibility.
And life from then on is a party of one.

THE PARTY SOMETIMES gets out of hand. It makes artists keep odd
hours, have odd habits, keep no company, attract pity and usually poverty
and stares. Being stationed permanently on the outside, summoned to the
depths Drop everything, just jump into your diving bell and dive-requires
constant access to the self. Artifice cannot be afforded, nor can subterfuge.
Small talk, politesse are troublesome barriers when the message must break
the surface. The most horrifying thing about art is its honesty, the truth
lashed to the mast. This, too, makes artists loners and loners artists. It is the
tendency of the recipient to kill the messenger.

As a strategy, some artists hide. Some go mad. Some get angry. Some cut the
traces and construct for themselves a world within the world: its design and
environment chosen carefully to best serve the art. To serve only the art. A
world for one.

Piet Mondrian is known for the angularity of his style bold opaque squares
factory-perfect, outlined in inorganic black. In his Paris apartment and later
in a New York studio, Mondrian worked in an isolation so steadfast that both
his colleagues and the press marveled at it. While early in his career he
produced expressionistic landscapes, distinguishable trees and flowers in
subtle colors, the style he later created and which made him world-famous
was starkly minimalistic, geometric, dispensing with any reference to actual
objects in the natural world. Accordingly, the titles of his works changed
from the likes of Tiger Lily and The Red Tree to Composition No. 3 and
Composition in Blue, Grey and Pink.

Just as Mondrian's paintings are frequently misjudged as lifeless and cold,

the artist himself was misjudged. Ascetic, given to meditation and frugal
meals, he arranged his studio to embody his style. Nothing natural was
permitted inside not even light; the window in his Paris apartment was
perpetually covered. A rare visitor later recounted how Mondrian's
workspace reflected "the same monastic simplicity which he always
preferred. The walls . . . are carefully painted white. The only things that
stand out are the famous squares of cardboard painted in the three primary
colors" and which were judiciously placed here and there amid all that stark
whiteness. His dishes were bright yellow, his table bright red. "He could
have lived equally easily in any town in the world, so long as he had a room
arranged according to these laws," the visitor noted. "His studio was like one
of his pictures, just as each one of his pictures was drawn in his own image.
He lived in it just as he lived in his work. It was the dwelling of a grand
solitaire."

By all accounts, Mondrian was a contented man. He was not a crazy man or
a lonely man or a suicidal man or a failure or a man who lived in squalor. He
had social graces, knew his manners, but chose not to be in situations where
these would be called upon. Fully functional, he published an art magazine
and achieved great renown in his own time. For his troubles this quiet figure
was lambasted by one art critic as a "cold, ruthless Dutchman." Like any
loner whose openness to others goes only this far and no farther, Mondrian
would of course be called ruthless. Selfish. Envy lurks in these accusations,
wistful envy for the visionary, for the herald, for the one whose master,
archive, palette is always himself.

THE BRITISH PAINTER William Roberts first became famous for his
powerful renderings of WWI battles, then was a founding member of the
Vorticists-avant-garde abstract artists whose name was devised by Ezra
Pound. In his memoirs, Roberts recalled how a London Observer reporter
"describes me as a recluse,' an `eccentric,' and a `loner."' An Evening
Standard art critic "adds some important touches of his own to my `Public
Caricature,"' Roberts wrote. "He finds Roberts to be `a notorious recluse,' `a
hermit,' `accused of outright misanthropy,' is `waspish and angry."' This kind
of art criticism "has its proper place," the artist wrote, among the Standard's
"accounts of Rapes, Dope Peddling, Muggings, Kidnappings, and the like.
This recluse accusation was first made in 1971 after a visit my wife and I
received from an Observer newspaper reporter named Barrie Sturt-Penrose.
We entertained him with coffee and homemade cake; in return, he went back
to his paper and named me recluse. It was repeated and enlarged upon in a
catalogue introduction" in which an art dealer took up the chorus.

"Very little is published concerning the characters and tastes of . . . art

dealers and critics," Roberts noted. "Their `Public Images' are practically
nonexistent. It would be helpful to know how they came to be art dealers or
art critics, whether they are `Playboys' of the art world, or just solitary
figures, `Loners,' as it were."

Roberts seethed at being called a loner. The word was an "accusation"

tantamount to "kidnapper" or "rapist." Just as many loners would not call
themselves eccentric but are called that anyway, artists might not call
themselves loners, but the public will jump in and do it for them, thank you
very much. Artists cannot escape the one-off spark of inspiration, whose
translation and transmutation demands solo dives. And all the cake and
coffee in the world will never vault them from the outside to the inside,
make them safe from that place loners know so well, where great, infinite
screams are heard.
9.
singular glamour
[LITERATURE]
Writers' closest companions are inside their heads.

RELA'T'IVE OF mine does not read my books. A stack of them stands

obelisklike on a dresser, rising in height as years pass but never budging, as
the sun fades the varnish around them in a neatly damning oblong. Their
titles and my name gleam on bindings virgin with that sleek, never-cracked
crispness. The books make sticky sounds when parted from each other, like
cries of protest.

The person whose dresser it is makes a point of buying my books when they
come out, and of mentioning buying them. I bought it! Yet during the
months and years when I am writing one, the person with the dresser forgets
what it is about. I tell the owner of' the dresser at the outset, then again when
asked say, a week later. Then all is forgotten and the asking stops.

The person with the dresser can remember many things that have nothing to
do with me and books. Details of conversations with the postal carrier, with
shop clerks, with strangers at Bargain Barn. The person with the dresser asks
me how I am, what are my weekend plans. The neighbor's nephew had his
fourth birthday and got a wind-up dog. My books might as well not exist.

PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS now and then hire models. Writers, on the
other hand, have no use even for hired company while writing. Even the hint
of human beings distracts -a doorbell, a phone, shouting in the street.
Appointments scribbled in a daybook. And distraction kills. It slices the
heads off fictional characters just as they open their mouths and begin to
speak. It lops their limbs off as they try to walk. It pours acid on poems in
utero.

Painters and sculptors have the company of paint and clay and stone.
Musicians have the company of instruments. Writers have nothing so
beautiful, just utensils and dumb machines. And their own minds, which
makes this the most solitary profession of all.

Only a brain. A three-pound organ the size of an eggplant produced Moby

Dick-another one Shakespeare's collected works. Yet another, Barbara
Cartland's 723 romances. A brain working like a ticker-tape machine,
processing constantly, reporting, disgorging. And ironically, as alone as
writers must be, writing is all about communication.

Written works do not produce fast reactions as pictures and sculptures and
music do. It takes no effort to see or hear. But to read-to grasp what the
writer has done-requires commitment. Engagement. As is the case with most
art, the relationship between maker and audience is remote in time and
space. The writer is nowhere to be seen when the reader takes up the book,
or even dead. But most often, books go unread. The fiction shelves in any
library are heavy with novels look at their checkout slips-that have not been
lent for years. Thus the writer, knowing this as writers do, is even more
alone. Who will deem my work worth his time to read? The few. Yet writers
write. And knowing what they know makes their isolation almost a
sacrament.

WHEN MY FRIEND Marie was in her twenties, she lived alone in a

Berkeley apartment writing fiction. Some of her work won literary prizes,
but, even more than that, she loved writing. She loved it so fiercely that she
would not consider having a roommate. She let her answering machine
collect incoming calls, and she went out very seldom, usually alone.

"I enjoyed the solitude," she recalls, "because I didn't like being interrupted."
And yet "this life alone was considered selfishness by others, who noted that
I did not share my time, my thoughts, or my possessions with anyone."

Angry people acted as if she was wresting herself away from them: stealing
herself. They told her to forget the M.A. in creative writing which she had
earned with honors and to get a real job. In her apartment, Marie was not
actually alone. Her stories, full of love and roads and music, were the only
company she sought, more than enough.
She wanted to sustain this for a lifetime. The odds were against her. They
always are, when loners say I am serious about this. My life and my art are
one. This sitting-at-the-keyboard-all-bymyself-all-day thing is not a hobby.
This is what writing demands of writers: time. Energy. Courage. The fury of
many and the rudeness of the rest.

You COULD WRITE a whole book about writers who were and are loners.
J. D. Salinger. Thomas Pynchon. Harold Pinter. J. K. Rowling. Jack
Kerouac. John Steinbeck. Anne Rice. Yasunari Kawabata. H. P. Lovecraft.
Paul Bowles. Charles Bukowski, buried in my home town. Henry David
Thoreau. Sam Shepard. Nathaniel Hawthorne spent a secluded childhood
with virtually no company but his mother, a widowed recluse. Hawthorne
read profusely and would later write to his friend Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow about his isolation, "I have locked myself in a dungeon and I
can't find the key to get out." As a boy at boarding school, Eugene O'Neill
had already established himself as a loner and spent most of his time reading
and writing. Stephen King who wrote twenty books in ten years and was
rumored at one point to produce some 5,000 words a day, 365 days a year--
scrupulously avoids interviews. When King announced in 2002 that he
planned to stop publishing, Entertainment Weekly predicted he'd become the
new Salinger. Virginia Woolf, whose writing captures humankind so
accurately, desperately needed the "room of one's own" of which she wrote.
James Dickey lived fast and hard, his loner nature and his passion for his
craft making him a much less than ideal husband and father. American Book
Award-winner Sandra Cisneros, the only daughter in a constantly mobile
family of nine, felt closer to characters in the books she read---such as the
heroine of Island of the Blue Dolphins, who lived alone on a desert island
for eighteen years than to her flesh-and-blood peers.

Before being killed in the First World War, H. H. Munro wrote savagely
funny short stories under the pen name Saki. Having spent his childhood
almost entirely alone under the harsh care of a hated aunt, Munro mocked
convention and hypocrisy in macabre tales such as "Sredni Vashtar," whose
small-boy protagonist establishes a religion-of-one with a polecat-ferret as
its god. Less bitter but just as keenly aware of her own isolation, Munro's
contemporary, Beatrix Potter, also spent a great deal of her childhood alone.
She did not attend school and devoted her days to collecting specimens on
solitary countryside rambles and drawing them in the nursery. The rabbits,
mice, and squirrels that were her only childhood friends inspired the
illustrated storybooks for which Potter later became famous.

Vladimir Nabokov devoted much of his youth to collecting butterflies and

composing chess problems -a pursuit which he would later say demanded
"glacial solitude." At school, other students considered Nabokov aloof. He
relished being a goalie during soccer games, set apart from the rest of the
team and, as he later recalled, "surrounded with a halo of singular glamour."

Nor can writers resist writing about being alone. This, too, could be the
subject of a book. In "Childe Harold," Lord Byron writes of "the feeling
infinite, so felt / In solitude, where we are least alone." Andrew Marvell
noted aptly, "Society is all but rude / To this delicious solitude." In "The
Crystal Gazer," reclusive Pulitzer Prize-winner Sara Teasdale vows to
"gather myself into myself again":

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent, Watching the future come and
the present go, And the little shifting pictures of people rushing In restless
self-importance to and fro.

Alexander Pope, more famous by far for "The Rape of the Lock," devoted an
ode to solitude. A childhood illness had so severely deformed Pope's spine
that he never grew taller than 4'6". This-and the fact that British universities
would not admit him because his parents were Catholic surely fueled the
sense of separateness that inspired Pope's "Solitude: An Ode":
Never marrying, Pope lived throughout his adulthood with his mother on an
estate beside the river Thames. Now hailed as one of his era's greatest poets,
he was known during his lifetime for being irascible, hypersensitive,
hypercritical, and viciously hilarious. In 1728 he produced a satire
lambasting his own critics and the dullness of people in general. Later
expanded to four volumes, it was called The Dunciad.

William Wordsworth wrote worshipfully of solo travelers he encountered

while wandering his beloved Lake District. The narrator of Wordsworth's
famous poem "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" draws
on memories of rural solitude to soothe his city-weary soul. Recalling "a
wild secluded scene" leads to "[t]houghts of more deep seclusion." He
remembers smoke rising from "some Hermit's cave, where by his fire / The
Hermit sits alone."

Now far away in time and space, "`mid the din / Of towns and cities," the
poet's "purer mind" seeks to flee "the heavy and the weary weight / Of all
this unintelligible world." To this end, he makes himself remember a
wonderful day when "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er
vales and hills." The only "crowd" he saw that day, he tells us, was a field of
daffodils. And now those flowers "flash upon that inward eye / Which is the
bliss of solitude."

As MUCH HAS been written about the reclusive habits of Emily Dickinson
as about her nearly two thousand short, sharp, elliptical, and passionate
poems. The passion in these poems, their frank casual diction, puts them a
hundred years ahead of their time and makes the poet's hermitlike existence
all the more mysterious. And her hermitlike existence has made the poems
all the more famous: objects of titillated scrutiny, like a bustier found in the
closet of a nun.

Brought up in a Massachusetts household by a devout father who coaxed her

not to read and a mother who believed her to be thoroughly uninterested in
literature, this unassuming figure never married. As far as anyone knows for
certain, she never engaged in a romance at all. As a young woman, she
began retreating from the public eye. By the age of forty, she refused to
leave the family home and would not greet visitors face to face, talking with
them only through a half-closed door. Her relationships with those she loved
best -a handful of friends and relatives were conducted almost exclusively
by mail.
Fewer than a dozen of her poems were published during her lifetime. When
more appeared posthumously, their wit and frank longing shocked those who
had known her. Not so surprising were those numerous verses about
isolation in which, for instance, Dickinson writes of the soul that "selects her
own society" and then quietly "shuts the door"-or of the soul as "an imperial
friend" to itself, secure in self-sovereignty.

THE PRAGUE-BORN poet Rainer Maria Rilke kept up a running

correspondence with a young neophyte in which he offered an accurate
picture of the professional writer's life. In one letter, Rilke notes: What is
necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside
yourself and meet no one for hours that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups
walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important
because they looked so busy and because you didn't understand a thing about
what they were doing.

`And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations
are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to
look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something
unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and
status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-
understanding...

"Think, dear Sir, of the world that you carry inside you, and call this
thinking whatever you want . . . only be attentive to what is arising within
you, and place that above everything you perceive around you. What is
happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love; somehow
you must find a way to work at it, and not lose too much time or too much
courage in clarifying your attitude toward people.... Only the individual who
is solitary is placed under the deepest laws ... and when he walks out into the
rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels
what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man,
though he stands in the midst of pure life ... if there is nothing you can share
with other people, try to be close to Things; they will not abandon you; and
the nights are still there, and the winds that move through the trees and
across many lands; everything in the world of Things and animals is still
filled with happening, which you can take part in."
As he is writing this letter at Christmastime, Rilke draws a connection
between solitude and faith, noting that "with work and with the repose that
comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything
that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we
will not live to see, as our ancestors did not live to see us."

WRITING NOVELS TAKES the longest. Someone I knew spent thirteen

years on hers. It earned fine reviews, then quickly went out of print. If
novelists were in it for the money or praise, all but one in a million would be
out of luck. Those thirteen years-the prime of that writer's life-are past. But
are they wasted? Well, she was doing just as she pleased. Sandra Cisneros,
mentioned earlier, spent nine years writing her multigenerational novel
Caramelo.

Writers are advised to write about what is familiar to them. Aloneness is

familiar. If not physical isolation, then spiritual. Thus Thomas Mann's solo
traveler, eyeing the boy whose heart he will not win, in Death in Venice.
Thus Kobo Abe's determined Woman in the Dunes. Herman Melville's
Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. Knut Hamsun's starving writer in Hunger.
Harper Lee's Boo Radley, the town bogeyman and mysterious recluse in To
Kill a Mockingbird. Reclusive chocolatier Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl's
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Ernest Hemingway's eponymous
fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea. Raymond Chandler's cool, intuitive
gumshoe, Philip Marlowe. Maria, driving the freeways in Joan Didion's Play
It as It Lays. Richard Wright's desperado in Native Son. Patricia Highsmith's
canny opportunist, Tom Ripley.

Reading literature means reading, again and again, about ourselves. Maybe
projections of ourselves. Fantasy blowups of ourselves. Ourselves in
extremis, ourselves if only. Ourselves swept away. Ourselves disguised in
chain mail, space suits, codpieces.

Few protagonists come right out and announce themselves as loners so

forthrightly as Captain Nemo in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues
Under the Sea. Nemo-his name is Latin for "no man"-helms the Nautilus, a
sci-fi submarine whose absolute self-sufficiency is his lifework. When a trio
of shipwrecked sailors is rescued and brought aboard, Nemo demonstrates to
these unwanted visitors the marvels of agriculture, cuisine, even medicine he
has mastered aboard the sub. His collections of art and scientific specimens
and books are "my last souvenirs of that world which is dead to me." His is
"a secret which no man in the world must know," Nemo says solemnly, "the
secret of my whole existence.

"I am not what you call a civilized man.... I have done with civilization
entirely, for reasons which I alone know. I do not therefore obey its laws," he
says, "and I ask you never to speak of them again."

Having fled some unexplained tragedy or travesty on land, Nemo declares:

"The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise
unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces and be carried away with
terrestrial horrors. But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their
influence is quenched, and their power disappears. Ali, sir, live in the depths
of the waters. There only is independence. There I recognize no masters.
There I am free." The sea provides all he needs. "Where could one find
greater solitude or silence?"

In Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse presents the isolationist urbanite Harry

Haller. That author and hero share initials is no accident.

An observer at the start of the novel notes that Haller "was not a sociable
man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced
in anybody. He was, in fact ... a real wolf of the steppes." As alienated as he
is intelligent, Haller declares his distaste for "the world of men and of so-
called culture," which "grins back at us with the lying, vulgar, brazen
glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of an emetic." Instead, he
allies himself with wolves whose habit is "to trot alone over the steppes and
now and then to gorge ... with blood or to pursue a female wolf."

"How could I fail to be a lone wolf," Haller demands, when he shares none
of the workaday world's "aims nor understand [s] one of its pleasures?"

New in town, he spends long hours alone in his room. "Solitude is

independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It
was cold" in the room. "But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like
the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve." A chance meeting
with a former professor provokes an invitation to dinner at the latter's home.
Haller accepts reluctantly, overruling, as loners often do, "my genuine desire
of staying at home." Later, "I dress and go out to visit ... without wanting to
at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour." More
people are loners than realize it or admit it, Haller asserts: "Without wanting
to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations." Haller's hyperawareness
is the kind that comes to those who accept "no reality except the one
contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life.
They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world
within to assert itself"

It is a loner named Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, who awakens one

day to discover that he has turned into a huge cockroach in Franz Kafka's
"The Metamorphosis." In "The Hunger Artist," Kafka created another loner,
a circus freak whose act comprises the deliberate "art" of starving to death.
Separateness has seldom been expressed so effectively.

Kafka himself was a lifelong loner. Keenly aware of his emotional distance
from others, he poured himself into his writing. The written word forged
strong relationships for writers, he maintained, albeit at a distance and with
strangers or, as he called readers, "ghosts." Kafka's extensive
correspondence with Felice Bauer, whom he met in 1912 and with whom he
fell instantly and wildly in love, is a study in lonerish reticence. Marriage
plans flare up, then fall through. "The possibility of our being together for
any length of time doesn't even exist," Kafka explained finally, as "my
attitude to my writing and my attitude to people is unchangeable; it is a part
of my nature, and not due to temporary circumstances. What I need for my
writing is seclusion, not `like a hermit,' that would not be enough, but like
the dead.... I have always had this fear of people, not actually of the people
themselves, but of their intrusion."

HARUKI MURAKAMI BECAME one of Japan's all-time bestselling

novelists with big, surrealistic, pop-culture-flavored books like A Wild
Sheep Chase, which features a talking sheep, and The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, whose hero spends a great deal of time at the bottom of a well.
Overnight celebrity did not rest well with the reclusive Murakami, whom
many peg as a future Nobelist. When his books started selling well, he
leftJapan to spend several years in self-imposed exile in Europe and
America. He once told an interviewer that his writings return again and
again to "the figure of the loner ... because it isn't easy to live in Japan as an
individualist or as a loner. I'm always thinking about this. I'm a novelist and
I'm a loner, an individualist."

The novelist-as-recluse is a cliche. The public kind of expects novelists,

especially very literary ones, to be reclusive. Titillation throbs in articles that
allude, for instance, to "the elusive Annie Proulx" or to the latest rumor of a
Thomas Pynchon sighting. When Pynchon leaped through the window of a
Mexico City hotel room to avoid being cornered by a reporter, it made
newspapers. (That and other reports about Pynchon often refer to his
friendship with the late Richard Brautigan, another literary recluse.) In that
titillation is deference. Awe. That such great works sprang from-who? That
not-so-special-looking little man or woman in the cheap shoes? As a recluse,
the novelist is part magician, Rumplestiltskin, alchemist.

But as such he is also suspect. No one saw him do it. Did he do it? How?

In The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger created the disaffected yet tender
teenager Holden Caulfield, whose narrative on postSecond World War
America exposed the hypocrisy and conformism that loners cannot stand.
Caulfield, who has since comforted generations of outsiders, made the young
Salinger instantly famous.

He appeared before an audience only once. Fame and its trappings, small
talk and hordes of sycophants, disgusted him. He went into recluse mode,
turning down interview requests and refusing to allow his photograph to
appear on the jackets of all subsequent books.

There was a string of books, popular with audiences, but these were all his
fans could hope to get from him. It perplexed Salinger, as it perplexed the
similarly lionized Jack Kerouac, why fans felt they had the right to want
more of a writer. He stopped publishing new works in 1965.

In his New Hampshire home, Salinger practiced yoga and Zen meditation,
solitary pursuits that primed him for the days he spent in a cement-block
bunker on the property, writing. His wife and children were forbidden to
interrupt him. The divorce papers filed by Claire Salinger in 1966 state that
"the libelee ... has for long periods of time refused to communicate with
her." A neighbor who came around canvassing for a charity later recalled
how the author "met us at the driveway with a gun in his hands saying, just
go away.'"

Rumors surfaced in 1997 that Salinger was planning to publish a novella

through an arrangement with a tiny Virginia publishing house. Titled
Hapworth 16, 1928, the work had previously appeared, many years before,
in the New Yorker. In the New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani
reflected on Salinger's "withdrawal from the public world: withdrawal
feeding selfabsorption and self-absorption feeding tetchy disdain." When
Salinger subsequently withdrew Hapworth from the publisher, it was
rumored that Kakutani's jab was the reason.

His absence and silence continue to generate buzz. A memoir published in

1998 by a woman who had had a brief affair with the author several decades
earlier was followed two years later by the memoir of Salinger's daughter,
Margaret, which claimed he drank his own urine, spoke in tongues, and was
once married to a Nazi.

In 1999, London's Sunday Times reported that reliable sources were

claiming Salinger had written no less than fifteen novels which he was
hoarding in a safe at his home. Had he never become a recluse, had he
simply died or produced a dwindling stream of mediocre books for career-
minded novelists, those fates are pretty much the same he would have
slipped into humdrum obscurity. His name might be remembered today. Or it
might not.

THA'I' THE PERSON whose dresser has a stack of my books on it has never
read them-not one, not even a single line by means of subterfuge, I loved the
part about the cannibals!-might shock you. Would it shock you if I said
nearly everyone else I know is that way, too?

Granted, I do not know so many people, but nearly none of them ever ask
me about writing. Not a word. How would they feel if I never mentioned
their pregnancies, their children? Writing is practically all I do all day, every
day, yet they talk about daycare and holidays and the assholes in the
accounting department. Like the person whose dresser it is, they ask how I
am but the question is general. As if how I am could be any other way than
how I write. They ask how is my husband.

What they talk about is people and activities involving people.

Writing is done alone. People do not talk about the things they do alone. Do
they talk about bathing, masturbating, emptying the litter box? Based on his
research about casual human conversation, University of Liverpool
psychology professor Robin Dunbar concluded that at least two-thirds of it
"is taken up with matters of social import." These include "who is doing
what with whom and whether it's a good or a bad thing; who is in and who is
out, and why." No other subject than these occupies more than ten percent of
all conversation, most subjects no more than two or three." Even on campus,
where he conducted much of his study, "it's the tittle-tattle of life that makes
the world go round, not the pearls of wisdom that fall from the lips of the
Aristotles and the Einsteins. We are social beings."

In their world, it is not safe to talk about things done alone. Unsafe or
boring. Nearly everything a loner does is done alone-at least, the things that
matter. So that when we loners are in company, those sparse occasions, with
those lucky few, what matters to us is not mentioned. Writing the physical
part of it-evades description. I just sat there. But one writes about topics, and
nothing is more interesting in the world.

Why don't you ask me? If you fail to, I will be a cipher to you, as scrutable
as a whiffleball and not as interesting. These hours, these days, this screen,
this is my life. They do not ask. It will not come up if I do not bring it up.
And I do not. I think I should not have to. I am testing them not that they
know.
I0.
jesus, mary, and Jennifer lopez
[RELIGION
They gather together to ask the Lord's blessing. The problem with organized
religion is, it's organized.

'O SEE RELIGION in action is to see mobs. Swarming. Seething.

Singing. Swooning. Studying. Marching. Slaughtering, slaughtered.

Church mobs chant, lit in the spumoni hues of stained glass. Buddhist temple
mobs file down mountain paths, all saffron robes and sandalwood. Mobs
immerse in the Ganges; never mind the microbes and the floating ashes of
the dead. Medieval mobs stampeded the unwary as they rushed to venerate
the preserved flesh of saints. Other medieval mobs on horseback massacred
Moors. The Moors, in turn, turned their Christian captives into slaves and
sold them. Mobs in town squares watched witches burn in the name of the
Inquisition. Mobs clash now, each asking its god to make it win, the blood of
both mingling as it spills. Backwoods mobs. Cults. Militias. Mobs who title
themselves grandly--the Salvation Army, the Moral Majority. Promise
Keepers.

They want us to think faith is a collective thing.

They want us to think faith has a lot to do with fellowship. That an electrical
charge links believer to believer, giving them the right to call each other
brother, sister, father.

Sure, faith is a jolt. And nonloners respond to jolts with a yearning for
validation. Did I feel that? Whoa, you felt it, too?! By sharing, by comparing
notes, nonloners decide what is true. It is telling that in at least two major
religions an important milestone in spiritual progress is called Confirmation.

Loners react differently to jolts. Since loners are often alone, jolts tend to
strike when loners are alone. So there is no one near to whom one might
exclaim, Did you feel that? But would we anyway? We keep things to
ourselves. The most profound things we keep the most to ourselves. We
nurse jolts. Saying nothing. For loners, discussing the mystical deflates it
like air escaping a balloon. Faith is a private matter-at least, by loner logic it
is. Praying in public, worshiping while rubbing elbows, seems uncouth, like
French kissing on a commuter bus.

For some loners, the structure of mainstream religion feels like a straitjacket.
Having to appear in the same crowded place at the same day and time each
week in school it could barely be borne. Does the divine run on a schedule,
too, with penalties for tardies? Nor can we force ourselves into feeling
brotherly about a mob of strangers just because they use the same names to
summon the supernatural as we do, just because they have read the same
holy book, or because we light candles at the feet of the same statues.

We are chary of consensus, and spirituality is so subjective. To a loner it

hardly seems possible-not even plausible-that millions could agree on what
God likes and dislikes and whether pork or beef is verboten. How, we muse,
can millions nod in unison approving the validity of liturgy? How can the
unseen move so many strangers in exactly the same way? Those millions---
nonloners, of course would say it moves them alike because it is real. They
would say the unanimity by which it moves them proves it is real. Loners
cannot help but suspect something else afoot, something pedestrian. We
know nonloners learn by imitation. We know they shore up their selfesteem
through imitation, through securing a sense of belonging. Nonloners thrive
on this, so why would it not tint their view of heaven? Among nonloners,
religion fends off loneliness, one of their greatest fears, both within the soul
and without. Fellowship itself is a mark of faith. And it is fellowship, the
heat of shouting brethren, that spurs movements-call it civilization, call it
fanaticism-by which mainstream religions make history.

Within most organized religions is a built-in drive to multiply, to proselytize,

to breed. This is how they become monolithic. It is the same survival instinct
by which primitive societies laud joiners and detest outsiders. Terror of
extinction still haunts the major religions: an old habit, unlikely given their
numbers. Holy wars reveal those fears in action, as do systematic forced
conversions such as those the Christian Church performed on Vikings,
Aztecs, and Pacific Islanders, often at swordpoint. Violence, or rumors of it--
the specter of holocaust, obsolescence or both-make the faithful want to
swell their ranks. Their martial paradigms, which are nonloner paradigms,
have survived for thousands of years.
For loners, fellowship is not a factor in the faith equation. The organized in
organized religion is a problem sometimes so intractable --a boulder in the
road that many loners come to think of ourselves as spiritually dead. We
slink away feeling like failures, calling ourselves lapsed. Because we cannot
bear a crowd, we say blithely or bitterly, resignedly- that we are not
religious.

It is a common conceit that only shrines as big as stadiums are shrines at all.

The crusaders have fooled us.

Shouldn't the divine hear a lone voice as clearly as it hears a chorus? If, in
fact, it is divine, its ears ought to be good.

What is a loner to do who is religious? Who loves the same god a mob does,
observes the same feast days, prays the same? Who has no quibbles with-
take your pick--kaddish or the rosary or Ramadan? Loners though they are,
they can make themselves accept that it might just be possible to share a
deity. Yet the one thing they cannot share is public worship, praying where
the crowds are.

Such loners have launched traditions of their own: small separate entrances.
Underground passages. Within earshot of the flock but, like all good loners,
out of sight.

CHRIST HAS BEEN called a loner. It is noted that he spent forty days alone
in the wilderness. He urged the severing of social ties when he said, in the
Book of Luke: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and
mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters ... he cannot be my
disciple." (Luke 14:26) Matthew, too, reflects on that statement, noting how
Jesus promised spiritual riches to "everyone who has left houses or brothers
or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake."
(Matt. 19:29) Matthew goes on to describe Jesus' denunciation of "the
hypocrites [who] love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street
corners, that they may be seen." Instead of praying in a crowd, Jesus urged,
"when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father
who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." (Matt.
6:5-7)

That sounds like loner talk. Yet consider the source. Christ was too good at
guiding crowds to have been one of us. Christ coaxed, convened, convinced.
Those who shunned their loved ones on his advice did so in order to join a
throng of disciples. Christ had followers. He needed followers. His closeness
even to the Twelve Apostles keeps him firmly out of the loner camp. These
twelve comprised a prototype for all later fraternities, sharing and caring,
Judas notwithstanding. As the Last Supper ended, Jesus declared: "I give to
you a new commandment, that you love one another, even as I have loved
you, that you also love one another." (John 13:33-35)

He had the multitudes eating out of his hand. His forty days in the
wilderness were likely motivated by sheer exhaustion: a need to flee, for
respite from his fans, as some film stars today buy their own private islands.
Maybe Christ went off alone as a test, knowing he would be hungry, thirsty,
lonely, tormented by Satan. True enough, he was.

In practice, Christianity came to be a very public not private religion. As it

grew in popularity, as it superseded ancient Roman paganism and spread
throughout Europe and beyond, it has become boldly visible. As such, its
most visible practices are shared practices: pilgrimages and revivals, masses,
campus crusades, televangelism, phenomena such as the Crystal Cathedral in
Orange County, whose televised services beam out to millions of viewers.
But from those crowds, loner iconoclasts have hewn solitary lives in huts
and holes and aeries, perched atop poles or buried alive.

Born around the year 251 in Koma, Egypt, the man now known as Saint
Anthony was a wealthy young Copt. It is said that one day at a church
service he heard those words of the Gospel in which Jesus urges his listeners
to "come and follow me." Interpreting this as a personal directive to enter the
wilderness, Anthony felt profoundly moved. Selling his property, he moved
first into a hermitage near Koma, then into the desert, where he set up
housekeeping alone in an abandoned tomb. There, in solitude, he stayed for
more than twenty years. He made it harsh: eating but once a day, and even
then only bread and water, sleeping only two or three hours every night,
wearing a hair shirt which the desert heat made itchier. Hagiographers and
such painters as Hieronymus Bosch bring us images of demons tempting
Anthony, to no avail.

Word got out. Soon a wave of followers fanned out across the sands, seeking
a life of consecrated solitude, like Anthony's. It was that rarest of
phenomena: a fad that entailed acting like a loner.

Chroniclers counted ten thousand hermits' cells between Cairo and upper
Egypt during the fourth century. Many of these lodgings were chiseled out of
rocky precipices along the Nile, accessible only by slender wooden bridges
which the hermits would remove at will. On a branch of the river southwest
of Cairo, the writer Rufinus of Aquiloa noted that "there is not a door, a
tower or a corner which does not house a solitary." Those among the hermits
who became saints, and there are many, are known collectively as the Desert
Fathers.

IN THE DECL,LNE and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon called
Anthony "a hideous, distorted, and emaciated maniac ... spending his life in
a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture." (This is a striking
assessment from an eighteenth-century British historian who, a loner
himself, once called solitude "the school of genius.") Other early hermit
saints sealed themselves inside hollow trees, immobilized, viewing the world
through knotholes. Others bound themselves in chains and lived that way,
alone, for years. Simeon Stylites dwelled on a platform, alone, atop a pillar.

As their legends have it, these saints met their own highly personalized
demons. Of one fourth-century recluse, it has been written that "like a horde
of barbarians his thoughts came crawling in upon him from all sides, raining
down as it were a shower of arrows." Mary the Egyptian, an ex-prostitute,
was seized in solitude with urges to sing dirty songs. Pachon had a vision of
an Ethiopian girl he had desired long before, as a teenager. The apparition
drew close and sat on Pachon's lap, looking and feeling exactly like the real
thing. Lust inflamed him, and it was all Pachon could do to slap the image
until it disappeared. His hands, legends say, smelled like the girl for two
years afterward.

Loners know about those demons. Even the least spiritual and least neurotic
has known solitude so deep that you can hear a pin drop at the bottom of
your soul. The brave let it bounce and abide, rather than run to the corner bar
or seize the remote control. It happens when doubts, regrets, choices made,
and chances missed swoop out of the crannies into which we have stuffed
them. Even the most secular of us has said, "I wrestled with my demons."

THE DESERT-HERMIT craze began to ebb as many nonloners, marooned

in the sand and miserable, realized their mistake. A kind of compromise
arose: monasteries and convents. These were semzhermitages, set off from
the outside world and shared by groups of men and women. These were
communities after all, but a few orders were truly isolationist. The
Camaldolite order, named after the Camaldoli monastery near Arezzo in
Italy, was founded around 1012 by the man who would later be canonized as
Saint Romuald. Inspired by the Desert Fathers, Romuald established a
routine for his monks in which each man occupied his own austere cell,
joining his brethren only in chapel. Nothing but dry bread and water were to
be eaten every day except Thursday and Sunday, when fruit and vegetables
might be added; garments shorter than the usual monastic costume were
worn to make the brothers feel more vulnerable. Saint Peter Damian would
later write that Romuald wanted totum mundum in eremum convertere: to
turn the whole world into a hermitage.

Another staunchly eremitic tradition, dating back to Byzantine times, is the

community of monks on Mount Athos in Greece. In the eleventh century, as
many as 180 separate monasteries clung to this steep, nearly 7,000-foot
limestone precipice. Today only about twenty remain, with kathismata (tiny
houses) and hesychasteria (more austere structures or rough caves for the
most extreme hermits) clinging to the sheer rockface like swallows' nests.

RELIGIOUS LONERS IN medieval France and England had another option.

It is surreal to modern eyes. Those were surreal years.

Plagues swept through towns, felling entire populations. War and disease
were endemic. Christians fought their fears with passion plays and paranoia,
melees and belief in miracles. God and the Devil loomed vivid and
vindictive. They were held responsible for sun, storms, stillbirths,
everything, watching souls like surveillance cameras. Is it so strange, then,
that many a church had its resident anchorite or anchoress living there in a
tiny cell, sealed into its walls for life?
These recluses could be found in most cathedral towns, silent behind the
ventilation slots cut into the church walls into which their cells were built.
Inside, a recluse had only a cross, a chamber pot, the clothes she wore and, if
she chose, a cat. The faithful brought food and water and carried off slops.

It was a sanctioned way of dying to the world. The anchorhold, as the cell
was called, was considered a half-grave. The Ancrene Wisse, a manual for
anchoresses, called an anchorhold a "burinesse." A nun choosing this kind of
life would undergo a ceremony whose scripture and ritual were almost the
same as those for funerals. One anchoress's ceremony, recorded near
Canterbury in the latter half of the twelfth century, features the woman lying
corpselike on the church floor as a portion of Isaiah was recited: "Go into
your rooms . .. shut your doors behind you. Hide yourselves a little while."
Holy water is sprinkled on the nun; then a censer is drawn over her body.
Mass is celebrated, a choir sings the funeral antiphon, urging, "May angels
lead you into paradise." Last rites are given. Then the nun enters the cell that
has been prepared for her, singing, "Here I will stay forever; this is the home
I have chosen." Further prayers, those traditionally said over corpses, are
recited as the cell's door is shut with the recluse inside once and for all.

IT WAS A solitude totally absolute yet utterly dependent on the aid of

outsiders. Ignored, an anchoress would die of thirst or starve to death in
conditions feculent even by medieval standards. To this end, Aelred of
Rievaulx, the author of a twelfth century anchoresses' manual called De Vita
Eremetica, urges the reader to post an old woman outside her cell to keep
unwanted visitors away and to secure the services of a strong young girl to
carry all the heavy pots and jugs.

Aelred's tone, as he advises on how best to be buried alive, is pragmatic and

in places even chatty. His intended readers were not considered mad. Not
freaks. Strolling past anchorholds while going about their daily rounds,
townspeople took for granted the unseen figures within and, in a way, relied
on them as symbols of calm in a time of crisis. As the Ancrene Wisse
explains: "It is for this reason that an anchoress is called an anchoress, and
anchored under a church like an anchor under the side of a ship, to hold it, so
that the waves and storms do not pitch it over.... She shall hold it secure so
that the puffing and blowing of the Devil, that is, temptations, do not pitch it
over."
Theirs was a permanent privacy but in medieval times, for women, asking
for any privacy at all was nearly asking for the impossible. The average life
included teenage marriage, constant pregnancy and motherhood from nuptial
bed to tomb. Solitude as we know it was out of the question.

And then, as now, sometimes the world seemed too crazy to bear.

Italian novelist Toni Maraini based her novel Sealed in Stone on the true
story of Alix Bourgotte, a French novice who renounced the world in 1418
to enter an anchorhold where she spent fifty years. In her cell, out of which
she could see only through a hole the size of a brick, the fictional Alix
considers her decision:

"During the insurrection in which my father was killed, I lived as a complete

recluse in order not to see the dead with their insides hanging out, without
hands ... I had glimpsed something so dreadful that it violated reality and
made it unbearable ... I had to escape reality." After seeing a young man
drawn and quartered in a public square and discovering that portions of the
corpse are to be displayed citywide, she vows, "so I'll never go again to
Porte Saint-Martin, or to the gardens, or any other place because even the
pebbles conspire with this world of evil."

"I wanted to escape completely from the city," Alix declares, "from
everything that stole my space." Mourning a figurative loss of space, she
resolves to confine herself to a literally tiny space, comforting herself with
the thought that upon her immurement "now everything must stop."

Her solitude is both refuge and protest, her cell a well of controlled sanity in
a world insane. "I could not crack life from without ... I could subdue reality
only by turning it inside out," Alix surmises. Less sensitive souls might take
public disembow- elings at face value, one pool of bile at a time. But,
watching a crowd making merry at a May fair, Alix sees the outside world
for the unendurable cataclysm it is: a spiritual rupture, a rot at the heart of
what passes for civilization. Neither willing nor able to bear any longer the
dissolution of the beauty of the world, she makes her choice. Cataclysmic
days call for cataclysmic measures. At first glance, modern loners might
shrug off any resemblance between Alix and ourselves. But who among us
has not shrieked while reading the newspaper, What a fucked-up world! and
wished to ditch it? Our luck is that to escape dictators and carjackers we
could possibly emigrate or retreat to the woods or, almost like Captain
Nemo, live aboard a boat. We can, if not protect ourselves decisively, at least
study our options, which are many, and find part-time refuges or partial
ones. We are mobile. We do not live in a theocracy. This is our luck.

How did these creatures spend their buried lives? If options were few outside
the walls, inside they were fewer. And yet "of little," the Ancrene Wisse
promises--advice every loner knows is true--"much waxeth." The manual
instructs its readers to pray, eat, drink, and sleep, though the schedule and
extent of these activities were up to the recluse herself, as was her manner of
dress. The outer life having been abandoned, the inner life was expected to
grow unimaginably vivid: a never-ending meditation session. To heighten
her inward focus, a recluse was ordered to consider nothing that would
utword drahe hir heorte, "draw her heart outward."

Warned that extreme solitude would render whatever she saw through her
tiny window almost unbearably intense, the anchoress was warned to keep
her eyes and hands well inside that opening through which they were wont
to leap, as the Ancrene Wisse put it, "like wild beasts." Talk with passersby
was not totally out of the question. Yet too much talk "grows into a vast
flood which drowns the soul, for as the words flow, the heart becomes
dissipated, so that for a long time afterwards it cannot be truly recollected."

Desire ached. When lust teased them, anchoresses were advised to visualize
their parents "drowned, or slain ... or that your sisters had been burned in
their houses. Such thoughts as these will often root out carnal temptations."

But desire for fleshly lovers and a heavenly one were different things
entirely. An anchorhold was an astoundingly private place. "With burning
love embrace your Beloved," the Ancrene Wisse directed, "who has come
down from heaven to your heart's bower, and hold Him fast until He has
granted all that you ask ... stretch out your love to Jesus Christ; you have
won Him. Touch Him with as much love as you sometimes feel for a man.
He is yours to do with all that you will."

THE ANCHORITIC LIFE was long out of style in the 1960s, when
Columbia-educated Kentucky monk Thomas Merton decided to become a
hermit. Merton's requests to move out of the main house of Gethsemani
Monastery and into an isolated cottage on the property were denied for years
before his superiors finally granted permission. There, in what he happily
called his hermitage, Merton blossomed into one of America's most prolific
religious writers. Producing book after book of his own, he also published
English renditions of the works of Lao Tzu and kept up a lively
correspondence with celebrity pen pals ranging from Georgia O'Keeffe to
the Dalai Lama.

Merton became America's most famous monk and its most famous hermit.
To an eager outside world, which read about him in lifestyle magazines and
bought his books, he was an interpreter of the solo life, producing journals
that stand today as some of the most extensive and accessible accounts ever
written of living alone. "In the hermitage," Merton wrote in his journal soon
after taking up occupancy there, "one must pray or go to seed. The pretense
of prayer will not suffice. Just sitting will not suffice.... Solitude puts you
with your back to the wall (or your face to it!) and this is good."

In "the hermitage: quiet and cool," where "I talk to myself, I dance around ...
I sing," he noted with delight what he saw. `A few birds. And nothing. Who
would want to live in any other way?" With jazz-edged rhythm and ringing
imagery, Merton exulted: "I am a solitary and that's that.... I am telling you:
this life in the woods is IT It is the only way. It is the way everybody has
lost. They have all lost their way and ended up in Coney Island, with the
distorting mirrors and the clowns with cattle prods that sting them up the tail
and make them run to their shame." Pretense, he noted, "is easy in the
community, for one can have the support of a common illusion or a common
agreement in forms that take the place of truth." But alone, "one is reduced
to nothing, and compelled to begin laboriously the long return to truth."

Yet the cottage was no anchorhold. For all the derision with which Merton
blasted society, and for all his gloating about his hard-won solitude, still his
deluge of mail included invitations and requests from fans who wished to
visit. He accepted some. Joan Baez came to the cottage. Like Thoreau,
Merton entertained more guests than you might think. He was a hermit and a
host. He was having it both ways.
"I become anxious to keep up with all that is being said and done, and I want
in my turn to be `in there,' to play my own part," he wrote. "I think I will
need to go out to Europe to see Trungpa Rinpoche's place in Scotland, and
the Tibetan monastery in Switzerland." Like Elvis Presley, Merton basked in
the benefits of a charisma fueled largely by his loner status. Good as his
books are, Merton was a bit of an impostor. A famous recluse is an
oxymoron. I'm a hermit, look at me!

He was not unaware of his hypocrisy. "Once in a while I get a glimpse," he

wrote bitterly of the super-hermit profile he was cultivating, "of the folly that
is really at the heart of this `zeal'!"

The ultimate test came in 1966. Shortly after declaring in his journal, "The
one thing for which I am most grateful [is] this hermitage," Merton fell in
love with a nurse at the local hospital where he underwent surgery. It was the
real thing. After returning to the cottage he spent hours on the phone in
impassioned conversations with this woman who, in his journal, he calls
only 'Al." Soul-wrenching letters flew back and forth between them, and M.
paid several visits to the cottage, giving Merton good reason to rue his vow
of celibacy. But in the end they parted. "Sure, I love M., but it can never
interfere with my main purpose in life," he wrote, "and that is that."

Ironically it was when Merton left his hermitage and went out into the
world--to Asia, where he convened with important figures including the
Dalai Lama--that he died in a busy Bangkok hotel, electrocuted by the faulty
wiring on a fan. To the end, he was torn between extremes.

IN RENDERING INTO contemporary English the works of Lao Tzu, whose

collected epigrams are called the Tao Te Ching and comprise the Taoist
spiritual text, Merton was working with the words of a consummate loner.
Whether or not Lao Tzu actually ever lived his name means only "Old
Fellow"-is up for debate. If he did, he was born between the sixth and fourth
centuries B.C.E., but almost nothing else is known of him. The writings
attributed to Lao Tzu are cryptic, concerning the tao, which means "the
way," the path, the ceaseless process of change. Every aspect of life, Taoists
believe, is either bright solid forceful yang or dark moist passive yin, and
everything is always changing, so the balance between yin andyang is in
constant flux. Since the tao is in everything and is everything, it makes
everything at once sacred and secular. To ride the tao is to go with the flow.

Certain Chinese mountain ranges are honeycombed with old pavilions, paths
and caves used by Taoist recluses present and past. Amid the roar of streams
and storms, the smell of grass, such hermits can truly live by the Tao Te
Ching's famous proviso, Those who know don't talk. As spontaneous as
sunshine, as flexible as bamboo, as free as a twig drifting downstream, the
Taoist hermit is a classic icon in Chinese art and literature. In Song Dynasty
ink-wash paintings, hermits appear as isolated specks on soaring cliffs and in
tiny boats, ready for anything. They get drunk, admire the moon, and elude
visitors in dozens of Tang Dynasty poems such as Liu Chang-ch'ing's
"Looking for Ch'ang, the Taoist Recluse of South Stream":
Like the unseen hermit, the narrator, too, is alone. Find the path, he says.
Follow the stream. Savor the flowers, the flow. Find the islet. Be like the
hermit.
In traditional Chinese culture, Confucian traditions form a tight net of
interpersonal hierarchies. It is from the fifth-century B.C.E. teachings of
Confucius, the philosopher known in Chinese as Kongzi, that China adopted
many of its age-old standards for filial piety and obedience to elders. With
its Confucian backbone and overlays of other strong social structures, the
Chinese mainstream frowns on living alone, being alone. Communism is
nothing if not social. Woe betide the loner assigned a lifelong job at the
commune. Amid this ambience, Taoism has always presented a respite, a
refuge from a system defined by personal obligations. During the Cultural
Revolution, many Taoist shrines were smashed, looted, and burned, and
Taoists imprisoned and killed as part of a policy to stamp out religion. This
did not in fact crush Taoism altogether, though it stanched to a trickle the
number of hermits heading off into the crags. Even so, some are still up
there. A Manchurian man I know met some and even stayed with one while
on a hiking holiday. While researching his book Road to Heaven, the
American author Bill Porter tracked down hermits so remote in space and
spirit from the world below that they knew virtually nothing of the events
that had shaken its foundations for the last thirty years.

BUDDHISM ENDORSES A strong sense of community not just among the

sangha, the monastic fellowship that is one of the "three jewels" for which
devout Buddhists give thanks daily, but also between all sentient beings
everywhere on earth, for which devout Buddhists are taught to cultivate
compassion. The man now known as the Buddha was a Nepali prince,
Siddhartha Gautama, and like Christ he was a born leader. As Christ would
do some 500 years later, Siddhartha entered solitude as the means to an end.
(Hermann Hesse, the loner novelist, wrote a book based on this.) Long
meditation under the famous bo tree brought the prince satori-enlightenment
much of which involved discerning the tragic but inevitable link between
desire and pain.

Neither as socially oppressive as Confucianism nor as freewheelingly

mystical as Taoism, Buddhism rests between the two. Aspects of the practice
appeal to loners: the inward sojourn of meditation, the bright one-off flash of
salon'. From deep observation flows acceptance and, from this, serenity: the
mindfulness by which each moment, as the Vietnamese Buddhist master
Thich Nhat Hanh likes to say, is a precious moment.
Loners do some of this anyway. Spending a lot of time alone is like an
accidental meditation. A casual mindfulness. We do not have to work at this,
at observation or serenity. Any loner is halfway to Buddhism without
knowing it. So it should not sur prise loners that Buddhist hermits have
produced some of Asia's most immortal poetry.

One of these hermits was Han Shan, an eighth-century Chinese monk known
in English as Cold Mountain. In his Zhejiang Province hermitage, on a
mountain that is also called Cold Mountain, Han Shan wrote bold loner-
friendly verses studded with directives about trusting one's own true nature.
He calls his departure to the hermitage an "escape," and boasts that his
solitary life gives him no worries.

It was Han Shan's Zen-flavored works that captivated the American poet
Gary Snyder while he was a student at UC Berkeley. And it was Snyder's
fascination with Han Shan that, in turn, fascinated Jack Kerouac when he
arrived in Berkeley. Kerouac's 1958 novel, The Dharma Bums, launched a
Buddhist craze in the West almost single-handedly. Forever the observer,
traveling solo and watching from the sidelines, the beat writer felt especially
moved by the solitude celebrated by Han Shan and his kind. Kerouac's 1965
book, Desolation Angels, recounts a euphoric stint as a fire lookout --a
modern hermit--on Washington State's Desolation Peak.

The twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist monk Saigyo abandoned his wealthy

family for the hermit's life, settling alone into a little dwelling deep in
cherry-blossom country. There he wrote his three-volume Sankashu, or
"Collection from a Mountain Hut," whose verses compare his departure
from the world to a game of hide-and-seek, noting happily that "the path has
vanished / To this mountain hut." In one poem, Saigyo vows: "Leaving no
trace, / Deeper into the mountains/ I'll go."

At the close of that century, another Japanese Buddhist hermit, Kamo-no-

Chomei, wrote his epic poem Hojoki, or "Visions of a Torn World" after a
series of natural disasters laid waste to Kyoto. In the wake of an earthquake
and fire, the poet explains, "I retired from the world." His remote hermitage
was ten feet square, collapsible so that it could be disassembled and moved
to an even more remote spot if need be: "I hide myself away, deep in the
hills." With a bamboo mat and bracken bedding, lulled by the perfume of
wisteria tassels nodding outside, "I can be lazy if I like no one here to hinder
me, no one in whose eyes to feel ashamed." Picking up a musical instrument,
"I do not play to please another's ear. I play just for myself." When tasks
need doing, the poet reasons with a loner's logic, performing them oneself
"is hard, yet simpler than using someone else."

"I realize how far I am from the world," the poet writes:
As ONE OF the world's most populous nations, India has in its major faith a
complex pantheon of gods. But even this divine crowd has its loner.

Shiva is hailed as the master of both creation and destruction. The river
Ganges is said to flow from his long hair. He is one of the faith's reigning
deities and an acknowledged loner. In contrast to social-butterfly Krishna,
Shiva is a solitary ascetic, a recluse who meditates nude while seated alone
on a tiger skin in a cremation ground. This spooky setting represents his
domain: the verge between death and birth.

His devotees, holy men known as sadhus, have for thousands of years lived
austere lives and practiced extreme physical discipline far from the hurly-
burly of Indian family life. Their wildly painted faces and ash-smeared
bodies pierced with spikes, posed in yogic knots, lifting bricks with their
penises appear regularly in documentaries about "outrageous Asia." These
reclusive followers of a reclusive god take lifelong vows of silence. Some
wear metal chastity belts, others sit with one arm raised for years on end,
atrophied to the width of a stick. Like Shiva, some sadhus go nude to
demonstrate nonattachment to worldly goods. In the past, sadhus were more
numerous, but even today it is estimated that they number as many as four to
five million. They are an age-old fixture on the crowded landscape, a
counterpoint to the crowds.

So standard is the archetype of the recluse in India that it characterizes not

just one but two of the four ashramas, or stages through which all Hindu
men-though not women--are ideally expected to progress. The first ashrama
is Brahmacharya, the student stage, in which a youth undergoes his formal
education, preparing for the social and spiritual life of the second, Grihavtha,
the householder stage. At this point, as a family man, he pursues wealth and
enjoys sex until he reaches age fifty or so. Then comes the third stage,
Vanaprastha, the hermit stage, which leads in turn to the fourth: Sannyasa,
the wandering-ascetic stage. The third stage demands such a sharp break-the
renunciation of home and family, work and society for a life of prayer in a
secluded but as to have become nearly obsolete in modern times.

Those who manage to reach the fourth stage are called sannyasis. While
those at the third stage can call a hut home, those in the fourth have no home
but the road.
JUDAISM IS A very social faith. While no less a personage than the Old
Testament prophet Elijah did a solitary stint in a mountain cave, emerging to
hear the "still small voice" of God, it is the patriarchs, soldiers, and
sovereigns who get nearly all the applause. Holiday celebrations rally around
such heroes as Judah Maccabee and Queen Esther, whose mission was to
save their people. As the author Jay Michaelson, a devout follower of
halachah (Jewish law), puts it: `Judaism does not generally venerate the
hermit who retreats to the forest to commune with God; it venerates the
individual who leads a community, or commits acts of loving kindness, or is
hospitable."

Social intercourse is written into the Torah, which tells Jews that the best
way to worship God is to perform mitzvot: acts of love and kindness.
Typical mitzvot include "love the stranger," a command that appears in the
Torah not once, but three dozen times.

This is only logical, as the Jewish people have been under attack for nearly
three thousand years. Jews have more reason than the followers of nearly
any other faith today to feel vulnerable. The Babylonians and ancient
Egyptians held Jews as slaves. The Nazi Holocaust, outmarriage, anti-
Semitism, and Islamic extremists vowing to wipe Israel off the map have all
posed significant threats to Jewish survival. News reports of suicide bombers
willing to die in order to slaughter Jews mandates cohesiveness.

Thus the path that religious Jewish loners have hewn for themselves is
obscure, a tortuous byway fraught with secrets and signs.

During the renaissance, an unprecedented number of European Jews took an

interest in studying the cabala, a mystical tradition that had begun with the
Gnostics in Hellenistic Egypt. Using intricate formulas, numerology and
scrambled biblical passages, cabalists trace the bonds between finite and
infinite, between fathomless God and flawed humankind. In a realm too
esoteric for any but the most rarefied minds, they also explore horrors
rivaling those of the real world: demons, the evil eye, zombielike dybbuks.
Tackling these concepts in their search for, among other answers, the "true"
name of God, the most famous cabalists were known for isolation: for holing
up in their houses and avoiding idle conversation.
One of these was Rabbi Isaac Luria (1533--1571), nicknamed Ha'Ari or
"The Lion." This hermit, a legend in his own time, spent some thirteen years
in solitude on the banks of the Nile studying the cabala, and bequeathed to
the world a cabalistic doctrine now known as the Lurianic system. His
teachings were embodied in the Etz Hayim or Tree of Life, a book whose
premise many compare to the Big Bang theory. In Luria's cosmogony, the
universe was shattered at the moment of creation into countless "holy
sparks," which flew off in all directions and settled into all things, rendering
all things in today's world holy.

Luria's teachings inspired Israel ben Eliezer, born a century later, to study the
cabala and to eventually found Hasidism, a branch of Orthodox Judaism
whose followers adhere to a distinctive lifestyle with its own practices, rites,
and look the male Hasid's instantly recognizable black suit, stiff hat, and
long forelocks. Eliezer, now known as the Bal Shem Tov or "Master of the
Good Name," was orphaned at five near the Ukrainian-Polish border. Even
as a small child, he was attracted to solitude. As he would later recall, "I was
drawn to walk the fields and the great, deep forest near our village.... Often I
would sleep overnight in the field or the forest." Found there once by a wise
man who asked what Eliezer was doing, the little loner replied: "I like the
field and the forest, because there are no people-the great majority of whom
are arrogant and dishonest. I am not afraid of anything."

He lived a wandering life with the wise man for three years. Then one day,
in a small village, his mentor directed Eliezer to the remote hut of a devout
hermit, who would become his new teacher. There in the forest, boy and man
lived apart from the world for four years, studying the cabala.

The Bal Shem Tov set a precedent for Hasidic solitude. Even so, it is not for
everyone. But the Polish Hasid Rabbi Nahman advised his disciples: "Find a
day for yourself better yet, late at night. Go to the forest or to the field, or
lock yourself in a room .... You will meet solitude there. There you will be
able to listen attentively to the noise of the wind first, to birds singing, to see
wonderful nature and to notice yourself in it ... and to come back to
harmonic connection with the world and its Creator."

In Nahman's view, solitude is only for the brave, only for those able "to
study the mysteries of silence ... his inner voice, the voice of the World."
ONE. NIGHT A while ago, I bumped into a woman whom I knew to be a
witch. A follower of Wicca, whose million or so adherents worldwide see
themselves as upholders of the ancient European pagan faith, she had been
chanting-the last time I saw her, which was years before-with a hundred
other witches in a park to celebrate the summer solstice. But she had stopped
attending such events. She left the coven to which she had belonged. She
works her rituals alone.

She had become, she said, a solitary. Not just "solitary" but "a solitary" In
her faith, there is a word for it: a name she knows and others recognize.
Wicca is as much a crowd scene as any other religion, its full-moon rites as
fellowship-happy as Sunday services in church: maybe more so, since most
covens work nude. Even so, there are profuse Web sites for solitaries, books
for solitaries, packed with instructions for working spells alone and
celebrating holidays - sabbats alone.

Perhaps Wicca makes such allowances for loners because, while

neopaganism is one of the world's fastest-growing faiths, it is still not
exactly mainstream. Well aware of the prejudice against them, witches are
quite secretive: staying inside the "broom closet," as they say. So as
organized religions go and Wicca with its discrete traditions and Books of
Shadows is extremely organized this is the outsider, the one other faiths call
a freak, just as Hasidism is collectively a lonerish branch of Judaism. Their
growing numbers notwithstanding, modern witches have good reason to
empathize with us.

IF THE CHRISTIAN eremitic tradition was already passe in Thomas

Merton's time, it has by now faded even farther into the realm of the archaic,
the arcane, the artifact. In a few medieval English churches today, empty
anchorholds are open for viewing. One such cell, at All Saints Church in
King's Lynn, is a highceilinged, white stone space scarcely wider than a
walk-in closet. A list of names evinces the succession of anchoresses who
lived here between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries: Isabella, Katherine,
Margaret. Their names make these women seem real, immediate. Yet the
cell's tiny size and starkness ranks it alongside all those other British tourist
attractions reconstructed torture chambers and grisly waxworks evoking
medieval illness and medicine-aimed at making us all realize how grim those
times were, and how far gone. In other faiths, too, the hermit archetype has
been mostly eclipsed, no longer vital and no longer all that well-regarded.
Fewer and fewer Hindus today progress beyond the second ashrama. An
increasingly populous world --a world less convinced, at least in a general
sense, of the presence of devils and angels has rendered lifestyles such as
those chosen by Saint Anthony and Han Shan impractical and nearly
impossible. Now and then we read of' "modern hermits" such as the New
York Episcopalian brother who, it was reported in the summer of 2002, was
directing an addiction-recovery center for HIV-positive men.

"Life as a hermit doesn't mean holing up in a remote cave," begins an article

in a local paper about fifty-year-old Randall Horton, a recovered alcoholic
and former Silicon Valley computer whiz who took holy vows in 1980 and,
in accordance with Episcopal law, is officially a hermit, a solitary, "but not,"
the reporter hastens to note, "a recluse." In a recovery center "decorated with
religious symbols," the gold-earringed Horton oversees residents and prays
with them, though his "short noon and night prayers are normally done
alone." The implication is that hermits are newsworthy novelties freakish by
definition but not totally repulsive if; like Horton, they make like normal
human beings and interact and do not insist on being alone.

FROM THE LOOKS of things it is all too easy to assume that religion has
nothing to offer us. Squinting up at monoliths, dogmas blasting in our ears,
we have good reason to shove our hands in our pockets, shrug, and walk
away. To some loners, the very premise of two people, much less two
million, agreeing on anything, much less on which type of headgear will
catch God's eye, is so principally flawed as to make every mainstream faith
seem hilariously funny. What would loners' religions be like, religions-of-
one, if we were permitted to have them? Tantric yoga on golf courses at
midnight? Surfing and plainsong? Jesus, Mary, and Jennifer Lopez for this
loner. Twenty-foot-high flaming effigies for that. Amen.
1 1.
new disorder
[SANITY]
They say isolation drives you crazy. Sure it does-when you can't get enough
of it.

" " CRAZY" IS ONE of those words. We play around with it; 'we
use it in a less-than-accurate way. Everyone does. We say it when we mean
something else. When we say something was a crazy coincidence or that
something is driving us crazy, we do not mean, precisely, outside the realm
of the sane. Not certifiable. Not crazy, really. No more than we really mean
love when we say we love the Houston Astros or onion rings. It is one of
those words.

But.

"Crazy" is a dangerous word. Loners have more reason than most to fear it,
even if we say it now and then ourselves. We have heard it too much - about
ourselves.

It is bad enough in casual conversation. And on the news: Let's hope they
catch that crazy loner. One of the quickest and surest insults, larded as it is
with implicit science, is to call someone crazy: to interpret his behavior or
his stance as the results of mental illness. It is a handy insult, too, because it
invokes proof and implies that this proof is evident to all. In this sense to call
someone crazy someone who, say, is a loner- is to employ the old witch-hunt
technique. Declaring certain individuals unfit, offenders, thus deserving
death. Ladies and gentlemen, observe this birthmark proving that this
woman is a witch. Ladies and gentlemen, observe this man spending
Saturday night alone, smiling over a comic book. Insane!

It is a way in which majorities assume authority. A way of saying in or out.

As if it were not bad enough that loners must deflect all those other
accusations friendless, sexless we must also face, like a dark cloud boiling
constantly on a nearby hill, the taunt, the threat: You're crazy.

Sticks and stones. Bad enough when average joes say so. But what of highly
paid professionals?

Therapists hold their clients' psychological well-being in their hands: that

throbbing baby-bird softness of hopes and sorrows. They can see into hearts,
can they not? And so they know loners are just the way we are; that we
might have trouble sometimes, but being a loner is not the trouble. That
loners are by nature no more or less likely to be crazy than anyone. That
being a loner itself is not a sign of being sick. They know that.

Right?

During the fifty-minute therapy session, amid those smooth sofas and
soothing carpets, clients seeking solace lay their souls bare. Whether fully
functional or barely getting by, the client proffers confidences, terrors,
problems to be probed like viscera in the hands of a haruspex. Truth must be
told. If not, what is the point?

In client-therapist dialogue, social interaction is one of the first topics raised.

Do you socialize? With whom? Doing what? When? How does it make you
feel? Discerning the nature of a client's relationships gives the professional a
view of the client's place in an inarguably crowded world. Fiery relationships
suggest-what? Insufficient boundaries? Low tolerance, high aggression,
being surrounded by bitches and assholes? Stress? Client and therapist work
together to separate the fibers by which the former is strung, like a spider in
a web, into his position. One by one is this a strong thread or a weak one?
Snarled or straight? It gives clients and therapists something to do.

Clients without relationships raise warning flags. It is a rare condition, after

all, and thus a likely danger sign. Psychologists have seen plenty of real-life
evidence that clients without social webs around them are in trouble. "Social
isolation" is a "fertile breeding ground for depression," asserts the Aetna
healthinsurance company, voicing the commonly held view.
But it behooves professionals to ask whether the client wants a web. Maybe
he does. Maybe he wishes everyone adored him. Maybe he longs for a wife
and kids but breaks out in a panic every time he tries to strike up
conversations with attractive strangers. Maybe he's lonely. Maybe he's just
new in town. Maybe he had friends and a family, but they fled because he hit
them and said Jesus made him do it. In which case, yes, the absence of social
ties is problematic. It is so because to him it is a problem. In the last scenario
it is also a problem for the ones he hurt. He feels isolated, and he feels bad.

But isolation is in the eye of the beholder.

The word, like alone and apart, has taken on a nasty tinge in common usage.
Its root is the Latin insula, meaning "island." Yet islands are nice. They have
an air of hedonism, sweet fruit, "laissez-faire at least the hot ones do. The
cold ones evoke bracing air, bold nerves, uncommon strength. To be
islandlike, isolated, insular, is to be at rest in the middle of the sea,
contented, self-sufficient, singular you would think. You do think. And yet
no man, as John Donne wrote, voicing the view of the mob, is an island. His
words echo down the halls of clinics all around the world, to this day, where
isolation is considered a symptom of illness and thus must be cured.

IF THEY ASK whether we are alone by choice, they are doing their job. If
they do not try to dissuade us, fine. If they move on from there to praise our
self-awareness, our skill at choosing and living as we choose, they are doing
their job. If they show us how to handle the slander, censure, jokes, and
misapprehension, how to toss all of that off like orange peels, or weeds, or
flimsy baffles set in place to hide the real road---if they do that, then they are
doing their job.

Some of' the most lonerish loners are resonantly sound of mind. Mondrian
was not depressed. The solo sailors discussed in another chapter of this book
are prime examples, too.

Loners know that. But we are the minority. It was not so long ago that
homosexuals were considered mentally ill, even by psychological
professionals who subjected them to humiliating therapies aimed at rooting
out their "problem" and making them straight. Today such ideas and
practices have been discredited, though the evangelical Christian community
sustains a movement devoted to changing the orientation of gay
churchmembers.

Being gay, like being a loner, is in this respect a nature-ornurture question.

Those on the "nurture" side might say I was born gregarious-that every baby
is, because humans are social animals, because in such a populous world
anything else is maladaptive. According to this logic, I and other loners "had
a chance" to grow up sociable, but blew it. Or our parents blew it for us.
They kept us away from other children. They abused us, thus filled us with
shame and made us misanthropes. Or we experienced trauma in, say, third
grade when the whole class ganged up on us, calling us Fatso or Gimp or
Kike. It soured our naturally friendly natures permanently and forever.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the nurture side of the argument has been
the popular one throughout the West, and has dominated discussions of
childrearing, social welfare, education, and other issues involving human
development. Does it matter? To some. Individuals who are happy see little
benefit in spending their time trying to decide how they got the way they are.
Those who are sad, however, make much of it.

MIT psychology professor Steven Pinker comes down on the "nature" side.
Behavioral geneticists, he argues in his book, The Blank Slate, have
assembled prodigious research proving that human tendencies, talents, and
the like are determined biologically. Thus, he believes, our tendencies and
talents are ours before birth. Newborns are fully fledged beings with
personalities already intact, he maintains, and not "blank slates" to be
inscribed by their culture, their companions, their experiences. Among the
piles of evidence that support his view, he cites the results of 2001's human
genome project, as well as many cases of identical twins separated at birth
and raised apart as strangers, but who are found, as adults, to share a
remarkable array of characteristics in common. Research has uncovered that
these shared traits include political views, mathematical aptitude, amiability,
and tendencies to giggle, gamble, get divorced, have accidents, and commit
crimes. A famous pair of such twins is Ann Landers and Abigail van Buren,
who became the top advice columnists of the twentieth century. Pinker
writes that the five major ways in which human personality can vary are all
"heritable" that is, inborn. They include "openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extroversion-introversion, antagonism-agreeableness, and
neuroticism."

Pinker has had his critics, including such notables as Noam Chomsky and
Stephen Jay Gould. Liberal commentators, religious leaders, and others
across a wide spectrum have attacked the validity of Pinker's evolutionary
psychology.

But if Pinker is right, his research indicates what many loners have always
suspected: that we were born this way. It is intrinsic and immutable, as
preprogrammed as whether we are good at math or languages. It is more us
than blood or bone, both of which are replaceable, or hair color and curl,
which can be changed. Of trying to reverse what is essential trying to talk us
out of it or train it out of us, deriding it as bad or ugly or evil or pathological
only disaster can come. I am not crazy now, but forced to act like a nonloner
for an extended period, I might go crazy. Forced to deny their orientation,
cut off that way from reality, loners could lose their minds. As deep-sea fish
die in a shallow tank. They are fine at the bottom of the sea, strange as it
might look down there, inhospitable though it might be to whales and
jellyfish and skin divers. As deep-sea fish that is where they have to be.
Dead in shallow tanks. In the deep sea, not dead. Loners left alone, sane.
Loners manipulated, loners not allowed to be alone, perhaps insane. And we
are forced to live in their world, aren't we? Their shallow tank. Made just for
them.

What the mob requires for its sanity is what whittles away relentlessly at
ours. Because nonloners far outnumber us, their prescription for soundness
of mind stands as good medicine. Contact! Chat! Cell phones! Spending as
few hours as possible alone! To us it is not medicine but a dangerous drug at
best--it numbs, it drains, it blinds, it depresses, it requires extensive recovery.
At worst, it is poison. If loners comprised the majority, we would decree our
own prescription. Work at home! 'Turn off the ringer on the phone! Cross the
street to avoid someone you know! It's good for you!

In which case, if it were that way, we could decree our loner standard for
insanity. That talking to others all day is symptomatic of failure to
individuate. That it indicates an unhealthy fear of thinking. That being
unable to entertain oneself is surefire proof of being sick. There would be
new disorders if we were in charge.

THAT SAID, WE would do well to think of being loners as what makes us

hale, whole, not in need of fixing unless that part of us is denied. Garden-
variety loners are not defacto insane any more than garden-variety gays are
insane. Or garden-variety nuclear physicists. But that said, there are mental
illnesses whose symptoms include acting like a loner. One of these is
ADD/ADHD, Attention Deficit Disorder/Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder. Kids who a few generations ago would have been called spazzes,
bullies, juvenile delinquents, lazy, crazy, stupid kids who can't sit still in
class, who space out or start throwing things are now often suspected of
being ADD/ADHD candidates. Some say the disorder constitutes a new
epidemic: between 1985 and 2001, the number of ADD/ADHD diagnoses in
America soared from about half a million to between five and seven million.
Symptoms include restlessness, inability to pay attention, and what the
Learning Disability Forum calls an "inability to play well in a group." In the
American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for
Mental Disorders IV (DSM4), a list of characteristics and personality types
that typically apply to ADD/ADHD sufferers includes "social loner." No
definitive cause has been found, though neurological sources have been
suggested.

Because they can be aggressive and cannot concentrate and thus cannot
concentrate on what other people are saying and doing ADD/ADHD patients
are often alone. No one wants to keep company with those who cannot
acknowledge the presence of others.

Another syndrome that isolates its sufferers is social phobia. Terrified of

social contact, seized by panic attacks and severe self-consciousness when
meeting others-often just when anticipating meeting others-social phobics
keep to themselves. They dread the prospect of being scrutinized, judged, or
embarrassed in public. Physical symptoms sometimes accompany and
exacerbate the emotional ones: heavy perspiration, tremors, nausea.

Not all social phobics are loners by nature. Some wish they could get back
into the game. Blaming themselves for the problem, they feel even worse.
Another relevant syndrome is avoidance personality disorder, characterized
by depression, extreme social anxiety and a feeling of personal inadequacy.
Another is schizoid personality disorder-a syndrome, not to be confused with
schizophrenia, whose sufferers are notably withdrawn, experience few
emotional extremes either positive or negative, and display a marked lack of
feelings for people in general.

WHEN NA'T'URAL-BORN loners do experience difficulty psychological

professionals face unusual challenges. What would bring this client
happiness? Given the dominant paradigm, how is a therapist to advise a
patient who actively dislikes being around people, whose peace and
happiness depends on not being with people? How difficult is it to tell the
client that this is okay?

My friend Marie is a loner. "I have always needed the freedom to be alone,"
she says, capturing in one word-freedom-- the key to what it is we all want.
Who could argue with freedom? Is this not the land of the free? In her
twenties and thirties, Marie lived alone. She was writing fiction at the time
and saw her solitude "as good because it fostered independence, while others
considered it bad because it was `isolation'- the term used by therapists."

Marie has been seeing therapists for more than fifteen years now, largely
because "the result of this independence /isolation is overreaction to any
social contact. I brood about a single nonhello from a store clerk for weeks. I
go through great lengths to avoid people; for example, I will walk around an
entire city block rather than pass someone I know even slightly. No one is
allowed in my apartment other than my boyfriend, and I won't get in
situations involving more than one other person. Human contact is painful
and I have a very low tolerance for pain. It is painful because no two people
can interact without conflict. Social contact and the resulting emotions
overwhelm me. I am extremely reactive in a tearful way and feel `done to' by
others. I also feel rage when anyone invades the careful boundaries I have
erected around me. Paradoxically, even though my solitude is by choice, I
feel hurt when people dislike me or ignore me. Their behavior makes me
hate them even more."

Marie reads a lot and, ironically, as she notes, "the books are about people.
Also, I am comfortable at a racetrack crowded with hundreds or thousands
of racing fans. Many of them are lowlifes or misfits like me. At the track I
can be anyone I want to be, and I can also disappear into the crowds so no
one can find me. The racing fans and I share a common interest about which
I am able to talk with a fair amount of knowledge. Offtrack, people talk too
fast about subjects I can't understand, such as world events. I feel that there
is a socially acceptable way to be, and I am not that way."

Marie's counselors have coaxed her to enter group therapy, which proved of
no use to her, and have given her "homework assignments" aimed at forcing
contact with others enter a certain store this week, speak to the clerk, ask a
stranger a question.

Still, Marie continued to feel distressed around others. Working in an office

proved untenable. Being a loner by nature was one thing. The panic and
hostility she had come to feel so frequently were becoming insufferable.

She agreed to try medication. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors SSRIs

became very popular treatments for anxiety disorders after psychiatrist Peter
Kramer's book Listening to Prozac became a national bestseller in 1993.
Coining the term "cosmetic psychopharmacology," Kramer claimed that
Prozac had made many of his patients "better than well," and declared that
the drug "seemed to give social confidence to the habitually timid, to make
the sensitive brash, to lend the introvert the social skills of a salesman."
After the FDA approved another SSRI, Paxil, which is now used widely to
treat social phobia, newspapers ran a flood of stories calling it the new
"shyness drug."

As has been discussed elsewhere in this book, not all shy people are loners
and not all loners are shy. But the idea of altering personalities chemically is
science-fiction scary. Imagine a film, or maybe a future, in which those
qualities the masses deemed sick were "cured" with a system of forced
medication. Could loners be medicated out of being loners? Medicated right
out of the world?

AFTER SEVERAL YEARS on medication, Marie says, "Prozac has helped

me speak up more, so I am able to order food or drink in public places.
However, medication has made things worse because it causes severe
tremor, so I quake violently when trying to talk to anyone. This increases
others' perception of me as a disturbed person. One of my psychiatrists
labeled me with a medical term: sociopath."

In the late 1990s, especially in high-tech hubs such as California's Silicon

Valley, diagnosis rates began soaring for a form of autism known as
Asperger's Syndrome. Usually first identified in childhood, it is
characterized by a lack of basic social skills and an apparent inability to
anticipate or comprehend the emotions of others leading the sufferer, as a
result, to inhabit a world of his or her own.

No definitive cause has been found for autism, whose name derives from the
Greek autos, meaning self. As autistics go, those with Asperger's are
relatively functional. They do not find life in this crowded world easy, but
with the aid of behavioral and other therapies, most can grow up to hold jobs
and care for themselves.

Asperger's was first included in the American Psychiatric Association's

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as recently as 1994.
Curiously, while about 70 percent of autistics are to some degree mentally
retarded, this does not apply to those with Asperger's. Many Asperger's
patients are extremely intelligent, revealing an aptitude for computers and
other technical pursuits very early in life. Kids with Asperger's tend to fixate
on computer games and video games with a repetitive relentlessness called,
in clinical circles, "perseveration." Because of its prevalence in tech-industry
hot spots, some researchers have suggested that children are inheriting the
syndrome from parents in whom it was never diagnosed-but who grew up
being pegged as geeks and computer nerds.

Wired magazine's Steve Silberman has speculated on the gifted/autistic/loner

link and its genetic ramifications. It is just possible, Silberman has written,
that "slightly autistic adults [with] the very abilities that have made them
dreamers and architects of our technological future -are capable of bringing
a plague down on the best minds of the next generation....

"High-tech hot spots like [Silicon] Valley, and Route 128 outside of Boston,
are a curious oxymoron: They're fraternal associations of loners. In these
places, if you're a geek living in the high-functioning regions of the [autism]
spectrum, your chances of meeting someone who shares your perseverating
obsession (think Linux or Star Trek) arc greatly expanded. As more women
enter the IT workplace, guys who might never have had a prayer of finding a
kindred spirit suddenly discover that she's hacking Perl scripts in the next
cubicle."

The increased media attention has led to a kind of Asperger's Syndrome

solidarity movement. Adults many of them loners-who have been diagnosed
with the syndrome or who, undiagnosed, are convinced that it fits them are
airing relief at its being identified and explored. One typical Web site offers
a list of "probable aspies" throughout history. It includes noted loners Albert
Einstein, Stanley Kubrick, Erik Satie, Michelangelo, and the playwright
Alfred Jarry, who lived alone in a crawl space with a stuffed owl. Also, there
is the best-selling nature writer Gerald Durell, who wrote amusingly about
his loathing for social occasions. Bill Gates is widely vaunted as an
Asperger's candidate. So are Jane Austen, H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Edison,
Wassily Kandinsky, Alfred Hitchcock, Mark Twain, Isaac Newton, Gustav
Mahler, George Bernard Shaw, Michael Palin, and Al Gore.

HOW DO SHRINKS really feel about us? In an essay titled "One Hundred
Tears of Solitude," British therapist Dr. Raj Persaud charges that rising
divorce rates and other woes have turned the West into "a society of the
socially withdrawn--her- mits, even. Are serial killers and mass murderers
simply expressing a common wish: People get in the way of life, so please
leave me alone?

"We gaze in horror at images from the Third World of whole families living
in one room; here, we can barely cope with sharing the same roads," Persaud
declares on his personal Web site, decrying the idea that it is "fashionable to
be independent and therefore alone.

"Some psychologists have even argued that the capacity to be alone, without
experiencing loneliness, hence the capacity to enjoy your own company, is a
sign of personal maturity and perhaps the acid test of mental health,"
Persaud marvels. Grudgingly, he allows that "practically all creative people,
and certainly most geniuses, have preferred to be alone for long periods,
especially when producing their best work" and cites Michael Jackson as an
example of this. Eyeing "the loners in the deserted corner," Persaud explains
that it is common practice in his profession to offer unsociable clients special
social-skills training to help them integrate more easily at work and school.
But some clients "reject this, preferring to be alone. They have never really
enjoyed company and don't want to be changed." Perhaps, he reasons, loners
are stunted in their development. After all, "sustaining genuine fellowship
requires a certain maturity."

On the playground, at the watercooler, the loner is observed, held up to

standard templates, and assessed. That dude is bonkers. It's so easy, so
comforting, in a way, for our observers to offer that explanation for what
they find difficult to understand. He's crazy, see? It is a weapon. Do not
mistake that fact for a second.
1 2.
the 1-word
[CRIME]
Criminal profilers, the press, and law enforcement are really scaring our
next-door neighbors.

NE WINTER DAY in 2002, fifteen-year-old Charles Bishop )flew a

single-engine Cessna into a Tampa office building. Luckily, no workers were
in that part of the building that day, so no one was killed in the crash except
Bishop himself, The boy had left a suicide note lauding Osama bin Laden,
whose followers had destroyed New York's World Trade Center just a few
months before. Right before crashing into the office building, Bishop had
veered menacingly over a nearby U.S. Air Force base. The WTC attack and
mass murder were clearly on his mind.

Newspapers around the world promptly dubbed the boy a loner.

The St. Petersburg Times and India's Deccan Herald, along with many
others, quoted Tampa Police Chief Bennie Holder calling Bishop "very
much a loner." Within two days, CBS News was calling him "a `troubled'
boy and a loner." Joining the chorus, the BBC declared: "Plane Crash Boy
`Shunned Others.'" To support that label, the BBC quoted a neighbor of
Bishop's declaring that the teen "never talked to anybody."

A few days later, the news coverage did a dizzying about-face.

"Friends Say Teen Suicide Pilot No Loner," announced ABC News. "Loner
label fails to describe teen suicide pilot in Tampa," echoed the DetroitNews.
Bishop's extracurricular activities were cited as evidence: the boy had
"played basketball and flag football, tutored first-graders and was a flag-
bearer." One paper after another chimed in, declaring that Bishop was not, in
fact, a loner after all. He'd had friends, some of whom were quoted and
photographed as proof. Others who had known the teen came forth, or were
conjured, to recast his public image. Bishop's former English teacher told
Good Morning America viewers that "Charles got along beautifully with the
other students." He had "worked well in groups." Bishop's middle-school
headmaster told the St. Petersburg Times: "Hopefully, it has become
apparent that he was not a loner."

As the dead boy's public image seemed to grow more newsworthy than his
crime, ABC News summarized the turnaround. "The bright, patriotic Charles
Bishop described by teachers and classmates," it reported, "sounds nothing
like the outcast loner ... making the questions about the incident all the more
baffling."

So, we are told, it's baffling when someone who pilots a plane into an office
building isn't a loner.

IT IS A word crime writers love. He was a loner is a crime-story cliche. A

quick look lasting no more than ten minutes yielded the following headlines,
all found in major papers: "'Loner' charged in killing." "Police-shooting
suspect described as loner." "Loner jailed for downloading child
pornography." "A loner with a deadly secret." `Jury hears portrait of a loner."
"Loner announced his plot to murder six."

"Killer was top student, yet still a loner," marvels a headline in the
Indianapolis News. "Loner's obsession with occult led to fatal stabbing,"
notes Britain's Guardian. `A gypsy-hating loner who shot to kill," offers the
same paper. Delving beneath headlines into stories themselves yields more.
A child-killer "was a loner with few friends, the jury in the Sarah Payne
murder trial heard today." `A `classic loner' just fired from his job at a
machine tool company returned the next day with a rifle," another story
begins. `A student described as a brilliant loner went on a shooting rampage
at the University of Iowa after being passed over for an academic honor,"
runs another. A piece about a racist, homophobic bomber explains how "a
twisted loner whose only friend was a rat dreamed of fame, power and the
establishment of a master race---as had his hero, Adolf Hitler." The story
goes on to add that he "spent hours" in the solitude of his rented flat, secretly
constructing bombs. "He ignored his fellow tenants," we are told. Aha. Of
course. We should have known.
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. No "normal" person-one with friends
and family, who says hello to his neighbors, who is recognizable as one of
the mainstream tribe --would rape a toddler or feed his murdered wife's
corpse to a wood chipper. (The weirder and more perverse the crime, the
more rapidly the press starts calling the perpetrator a loner. In even that
lamebrained condemnation is a brutish compliment: they admit loners are
creative.) Declaring criminals loners especially the sickest criminals is a
form of primitive self-defense. It sets crime and the criminal mind safely
outside the familiar realm of the majority. It is a way of saying This could
never happen here. The kind of person who does THAT could never possibly
be one of us. The creep whose deeds render him horrible by any standards
must be further demonized. Must be farther removed, set off farther than jail
or the status of killer and condemned man. To ensure his separateness, to
quarantine him, fling him beyond recognizability, sympathy, and even
humanity, call him a loner.

While serving this purpose, the neutral word "loner" acquires a hideous
coating.

Even as this scares the masses, it consoles them. At some level, the idea of
the homicidal monster lurking out there somewhere titillates, like the idea of
sharks. This demonization lends the 1-word a certain power. It purges.

Bur LEARNING THE true stories of criminals who are called loners in the
press reveals, with striking frequency, that these are not genuine loners. At
first glance, they look or act like loners, but they are not. They do not wish
to be alone. Their dislike of being alone is what drives them to violence. But
more on that later.

Journalists are clever, but they did not come up with the loner/killer thing all
on their own. They take their cue from law enforcement. In the ranks, the
antiloner prejudice is taken for granted not as prejudice, though, but as fact.
Typical is the poster an Illinois police department issued after the murder of
a local man in 2000. In an effort to locate the unknown assailant, the poster
advised its readers to look out for anyone who "may be a loner." This "loner"
was also, the poster added, likely to exhibit "paranoid, nervous, agitated, or
apprehensive behavior, boasts or brags about getting away with something"
and may have recently repainted his or her car. The fact that loners are about
the least likely people in the world to boast or brag seems to have escaped
the cops.

In the autumn of 2001, after anthrax spores sent through the mail killed
several Americans, the FBI issued an official profile of the sender. "Loner
Likely Sent Anthrax, FBI Says," ran the Los Angeles Times headline. "FBI
looking for a loner," declared Taiwan's Taipei Times. Other papers and
networks worldwide joined the chorus. The profile also suggested that the
killer was a twentysomething American male scientist, familiar with New
Jersey, who tended to hold grudges. While these details were mentioned in
the articles, they did not make it into the headlines. Front pages did not
scream, "Garden State grudge-holder sought" or "FBI pegs chemists." Of all
the possible earmarks, "loner" took the hit.

If "driving while black" is cause for suspicion, then driving while a loner is
none too safe, either. Imagine the uproar if all the articles cited so far in this
chapter had used the words "Canadian" or "CPA' instead of "loner."

IN THE. SUMMER of 2002, a California man was charged with attempted

murder after spraying Raid on his ex-girlfriend's lipstick and allergy
medication believing it would poison her. Years before, this man had warned
this woman that if she ever left him for another, he would kill her. When she
finally broke up with him, he put his plan into action. His intended victim
discovered the insecticide on her belongings before any harm was done, and
the man was promptly arrested. The couple's neighbor told the San Francisco
Chronicle that the allegations surprised her because the accused man was
"outgoing and friendly."

"I didn't believe it," she told the reporter. "You'd see him more than you'd see
her, and he'd wave. I thought he was a great guy.... My son and his friends
used to ride their bikes and stop and shake his hand and talk to him."

This would-be killer seemed unkillerlike because he shook hands. The

premise is absurd, and all the more compelling for its absurdity. Does it take
a genius to see that it takes a social man to become so possessive, so
enmeshed with others, that his rage and jealousy over a breakup make him
want to kill? These are the motives that ignite most violence. Anger. Envy.
Desire. Betrayal. Resentment. Rejection. Love. These are social motives, the
concerns of those wrapped up in the thoughts and actions of others. These
are the motives of those who cannot stand being left out, who do not heal
quickly from ridicule, who seethe over dents in their reputations. These are
the motives of those who need others. They need others for their very sense
of self, they live for the responses they elicit from others. When the response
is wrong, or never comes, the result is often bloody indeed. Revenge,
retaliation, retribution.

These are not the motives that move loners. We do not want those things
from others acceptance and admiration and control and power that make
social people kill. We neither hang nor thrive on what others think, say or do.
The fact that we mind our own business saves us from the types of torment
that typically lead to violence. We want nothing from others but to be left
alone.

We lack the motive. Tell that to the newspapers.

WHEN A CRIMINAL is labeled a loner, from what criteria is the label

drawn? How do the labelers devise their definition? Largely from what they
see on the surface. Lives alone? He is a loner. Not married? A loner. No
friends? No kids? Quiet? Loner. Does not confide in coworkers? Loner. All
these things indicate a state of aloneness. But is that person alone by choice,
as loners are? Most likely not. Aloneness itself tells us nothing. The seven-
time deadbeat dad with bad breath and festering chancres and only one
hobby, shooting squirrels, is alone but only because no one can stand him. In
his studio apartment, he eats solitary meals and comes and goes in silence,
carrying his hunting rifle in and out. Alone, but not a loner.

WHAT WE HAVE here is a crisis of semantics. The word "loner," based on

the shallowest impressions of surface appearances, is being used wholesale
to tar an amazing diversity of people most of them not loners-with the same
mucky brush. This crisis not only insults true loners, criminalizing innocent
people through wrongheaded logic and myopic observation. It also keeps
many actual criminals free, evading suspicion as they bask in the safety of
neither being nor appearing to be loners. By sharpening the terminology,
providing a language lesson, we could do a lot more justice all the way
around.

If by "loner" we mean "someone who prefers to be alone," this is our starting

point. Others might quibble with our definition, arguing that "loner" means
only "alone a lot." But one of this book's purposes is to refine the word, to
put a finer point on it. The term `Arab" was long used to describe natives of
every country between Morocco and Pakistan. It has taken the world a long
time to understand that many other ethnic groups live in those regions who
are not Arabs. The world will use words ignorantly until, and sometimes
even after, it has been informed of their inaccuracy or overgeneralization or
offensiveness. We must start somewhere.

So this is our definition. Scratch the surface of those killers branded with a
big red "L," and more often than not you will find quite the opposite. You
will find nonloners in loners' clothing, impostors. You will find not loners at
all, but pseudoloners.

The most common variety of criminal pseudoloner is the outcast. An outcast

has been in, or tried to get in, but has been cast out. He has failed to achieve
his goals: acceptance, approval, coolness, companionship. This hurts. It
really burns.

WHY ARE OUTCASTS cast out? Sometimes because they have done or
said something that incensed their peer group. Has he hit up on a buddy's
wife? Does he show up on doorsteps in the middle of the night begging for
beer, a place to sleep, a loan? Sometimes they're simply assholes. Just
because someone is sociable does not mean he is likable. He might be clingy
or aggressive or demanding. Who does not remember that desperate kid in
school who tried so hard to be accepted by the drama club, the football team,
the yearbook staff but, for his fumbling efforts, was always rejected?
Sometimes those who shunned him laughed at him. Sometimes they
shuddered, saying He gives me the creeps. Sociable types are just as capable
of being rude, grating, and gross as loners are of being sweet, polite, and
gracious.
Ever since Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 and convicted of being
the Unabomber having maimed and killed his victims with mail bombs for
over twenty years he has been held up as the classic example of a criminal
loner. It is virtually impossible to say that one is writing a book about loners
without someone's mentioning Kaczynski. In the days and weeks after his
arrest, networks around the world screened footage of the remote cabin
where he lived alone, virtually friendless. He had cut off contact years before
with his family - the family that, ultimately, turned him in. After Kaczynski's
arrest, reporters rounded up former classmates and colleagues who had
known him at Berkeley and Harvard. They called him standoffish.

Alone he surely was. But why?

As a mathematical genius, the schoolboy Kaczynski would have found few

kids with whom he could relate. He tried, though. Former classmates
remembered him as a good-humored jokester who played in the school band.
A pipe bomb he built as a youth earned him an ironic burst of fame on
campus which gave him a warm sense of acceptance. His high-school
physics teacher insisted that Kaczynski was "not the loner he's been
portrayed to be." But being so far ahead of his peers intellectually, if not
emotionally, made bonding difficult. After his arrest, Kaczynski would tell a
psychiatrist: "By the time I left high school I was definitely regarded as a
freak by a large segment of the student body." As a young adult, he
established a relationship with a female coworker. It soured, and Kaczynski's
furious reaction was to write nasty limericks about the woman and post them
around the office. His boss, who also happened to be the brother who
decades later would turn him in to the FBI, fired him. Kaczynski was not a
smooth character, not the life of the party, but he was trying. And like
nonloners all over the world, he was finding ways of defending himself
against the pain of being rejected. He was learning how it feels to nurse hurt,
how to seethe, how to blame others for not responding as one wishes. Before
breaking off contact with his family, Kaczynski offered in a letter to his
mother an eloquent precis of how a nonloner can come to resemble a loner:

"Suppose that for a period of years whenever you touchedlet us say -a

banana, you got a severe electric shock. After that you would always be
nervous around bananas, even if you knew they weren't wired to shock you.
Well, in the same way, the many rejections, humiliations and other painful
influences that I underwent during adolescence at home, in high school, and
at Harvard have conditioned me to be afraid of people."

His fear of social pain, his mental illness and the fact that he happened to be
building bombs made him secretive. Right there are three reasons a nonloner
might be alone.

James Daveggio was sentenced to death in California in the summer of 2002

for abducting, brutally torturing, and killing a young woman. He has also
been linked to several other similar killings. At the time of the crime for
which he was convicted, Daveggio might easily have been mistaken for a
loner. In fact he was anything but, according to Carlton Smith, whose book,
Hunting Evil, profiles Daveggio. The killer had been popular, albeit with a
rough crowd, as early as junior high school, and had a continuous stream of
girlfriends and wives starting at age thirteen. Quoted in Smith's book,
Daveggio's ex-wives noted that it was his outgoing personality, in fact, that
initially attracted them. Even one of his victims- -a woman he was convicted
of raping -reported that he had been nice, polite, and friendly when he
picked her up at a bar.

Membership in a biker gang brought Daveggio his dream come true: a loyal
peer group of the sort who, as Smith puts it, "run in packs."

"With the gang," Smith told me shortly after Daveggio's sentencing, "he was
popular." But when Daveggio's irascibility and passion for crystal meth
proved too much even for his fellow bikers "they repudiated him. Even the
most antisocial people repu diated him. He became an outcast of the
outcasts, and I think that had a very large effect on him." Drowning his sense
of rejection in more meth, Daveggio sank farther and farther into an isolation
that enraged him. No one wanted him around except the ex-prostitute who
was his accomplice in that brutal murder. Virtually friendless, he might have
appeared to be a loner. But this aloneness had everything to do with
Daveggio's personal failures "and self-destruction," Smith says. The outcast
struck back.

For a social creature to whom the presence of others means a great deal,
being cast out of a gang, a marriage, a workplace, a friendship, a family-is
serious punishment. Plunged into social solitary confinement, he struggles
with strong negative feelings that cut him off both physically and mentally
from what he needs most: company. With whom, in his new isolation, can he
discuss his pain? For him, aloneness is so gross and so unnatural that it
thrusts him beyond the pale. It is a vicious circle. It proves just too much to
bear.

OTHER PSEUDOLONERS ARE set apart from others not by will, but
pathology. Unkind as it sounds, the mentally ill are not as a rule enjoyable or
even easy to be around. So most people avoid them. The outlook of an
unsound mind is so singular that it cannot really be shared by others but the
owner of that unsound mind does not always realize this. The mentally ill
might want to reach out, might, in fact, imagine bonds where there are none.
They might wish for acceptance, might not understand----any more than
anyone does--why their affections go unheeded. Homeless or not, harmless
or not, outside of institutions the mentally ill are pretty much consigned to
lives of isolation. Not by choice in every case. A schizophrenic living under
a bridge who murders a hapless passerby, believing it will forestall
Armageddon, is not necessarily a loner.

Blue-blooded serial killer Hadden Clark, who has confessed to the murders
of at least a dozen women, believes one of his fellow inmates in a Maryland
prison is Jesus Christ. Clark, whose family tree leads back to the Mayflower,
exhibits multiple personalities, most of them female. He says "the ladies"
murdered his victims, slashing and dismembering and in some cases dining
on them. Adrian Havill, a true-crime author who visited the killer in jail
while researching his book, Born Evil, describes Clark hoarding food until it
reeked and grew tresses of mold, then eating it happily.

During the years when he was preying on and killing his many victims,
Clark lived alone in a tent in the woods, far from prying eyes. This remote,
solitary domicile, just big enough for one, is what led the media to roundly
dub Clark a loner after his arrest. Even the back cover of Born Evil calls him
a "reclusive loner." Yet, in the book, Havill himself tells a different story.
Clark, he writes, had "a social hunger." He was a fixture in local bars where,
joking with servers and fellow patrons until closing time, "he needed to be
around others.... Hadden was a man to whom friends were invaluable."
Avidly attending Bible-study classes, "he yearned for acceptance," Havill
writes. The pastor who taught these classes is quoted as saying that Clark
tried fervently to make friends there but lacked sufficient social skills to win
anyone over. Rollerblading around town, "willing to take any odd job that
brought him into contact with people," Havill writes, Clark was "just lonely."

Lonely, not a loner. Lonely, which pretty much defines him as not a loner.
Deranged. Living alone how else to conduct an extended campaign of
killings before being caught? But desperate for friends: not a loner.

MANY PSEUDOLONERS ARE alone because they have something to

hide. If your freezer were stocked with severed heads or your bookcase with
racist propaganda or your cabin with explosives, you might hesitate to have
a party.

Other pseudoloners kill because they want attention. John Lennon's

murderer, Mark David Chapman, is regularly dubbed a loner. A typical
headline that appeared after the 1980 crime was "Loner Shot Lennon." This
is a classic case of the public's believing-forging a consensus on-what it
wants to believe. Who else, it reasoned, could kill a crowd favorite, loved by
billions, but a loner? Who else but a loner would punish the masses that way,
destroying not a politician or an ordinary man who will be mourned only by
his friends but John, a universal phenomenon? That Chapman had been
reading The Catcher in the Rye that day, that before killing Lennon he asked
the singer to sign a copy of this loner anthem, authored by the literary
recluse J. D. Salinger, fueled the flame. Yet Chapman had been outgoing. He
had been a counselor and the assistant director of a youth camp. Back home
in Honolulu, he had worked amid the clubby atmosphere of a YMCA. He
courted women Asian women who resembled Yoko Ono, the wife of his
idol. Chapman wanted fame.

It should be noted that while many loners become famous artists, scientists,
inventors, most notably fame is not the goal but a side effect, often an
unwanted one. In Chapman's case, notoriety was the goal: the ultimate form
of acceptance, if a twisted one. The murder was a nonlonerish matter of look
at me.

"I was `Mr. Nobody,"' Chapman has been quoted as saying, "until I killed the
biggest `somebody' on earth."
TIMIOTHY MCVEIGH "AS neither crazy nor an outcast. Following his
arrest for the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the
young Gulf War veteran was described over and over in the media as a loner.
CNN called him "tall, lean, a loner." The Denver Post called him an "angry,
maniacal loner." Wisconsin's Beloit Daily News called him a "hateful,
paranoid loner." Asiaweek called him a "disaffected loner." An FBI
psychologist went on record describing McVeigh as an asocial, asexual
loner. Others chimed in, comparing McVeigh's loner status to the
Unabomber's, casting him so unanimously in this role that the public could
hardly harbor any doubts that it was accurate.

Yet his service in the war earned McVeigh a Combat Infantry Badge and
Bronze Star. Being such a good soldier requires cooperation and obedience -
neither of which are loner qualities. In the army he made friends easily,
including with the two with whom he enacted the bombing plot.

Interviewed in jail while awaiting trial by a Time reporter, McVeigh

remarked that the media had been misrepresenting him.

"The big misconception," he said, "is that I'm a loner. Well, I believe in
having my own space and being on my own sometimes. But that in no way
means that I'm a loner, which the press likes to equate with an introvert.
That's a complete misconception. Women, social life ." He laughed. "I'm
misunderstood through labeling. Speed freak. Gun freak. Loner. All those
misconceptions" had given the public, he lamented, "a completely different
picture of me. The real me has not been reported to the press."

After his execution in June 2001, the Cape Cod Times ran this headline:
"McVeigh stays a loner to the end."

He would not have liked that.

McVeigh had longed to join the Green Berets but failed the entrance test, a
failure that devastated him. This sense of rejection might have been what
fueled his growing anti-government, extremely right-wing sentiments. But in
pursuing those sentiments to a violent conclusion, McVeigh saw himself not
as a lone crusader on a solitary mission but as one of many: an infantryman
in a different kind of army, a brotherhood of patriots.
MANY SUCH BROTHERHOODS are thriving around the world. Their
members are not loners, but each group behaves, as a unit, the way the
public thinks loners behave. Not as loners really behave, but as we are all too
often accused of behaving. Secretive. Prickly. Separatist. Obviously hiding
something. Volatile.

Hate groups, cults, sinister sects-their members are bound by shared beliefs,
goals, agendas, motives, methods. Each group has its system. That system
becomes the group's identity. And in such groups, identity is everything.
Nowhere else is groupthink so much in evidence, so de rigueur, as there.

The secrecy, the prickliness, those other qualities are motivated not by true
lonerish instincts but by pseudoloner instincts. As a rule, these groups do not
simply feel happier to be by themselves, as loners do, but are actively
hostile. In most cases they are actually hiding something. Their goals and
methods are unconventional, beyond the pale, illegal. As units, they are
outsiders. Typically, when one of their members is implicated in a crime, he
is readily dubbed a loner. Yet members of these groups are quite the
opposite. Having subordinated their own identity to that of the clan, they
cease to operate as individuals. Thriving entirely on the fact of membership,
fellowship, groupthink, these people are drones, replicants, Myrmidons.

Men like McVeigh and McVeigh knew this are not loners. They need one
another. Even if they never meet, it is imperative that they know the others
exist, that their voices are not lone cries in a wood but a chorus. Militia is a
collective noun.

You would think crime fighters could see this. Yet even at the highest
echelons, they persist in confusing the group with its members, and even
then playing fast and loose with the 1word. On the heels of the Oklahoma
City bombing, the justice Department created a report in 1998 on
homegrown terrorists, identifying them as an increasingly significant threat
to American security. An article about this report in the Washington Post was
headlined 'A Most Dangerous Profile: The Loner."

Along with McVeigh, the main example cited in the article is Eric Rudolph,
a fundamentalist Christian charged in the bombing of an Alabama abortion
clinic and suspected of placing explosives in an Atlanta park during the 1996
Olympics. Still at large as of this writing, Rudolph is, like McVeigh,
described universally in the media as a loner. Yet as the Post reveals, from
his teens onward, Rudolph belonged to a radical organization, the Christian
Identity movement. After embarking on a life of crime, federal investigators
agree, he maintained contact with members of Christian Identity as well as
with the racist, Idahobased group Aryan Nations. For Rudolph to have
stayed hidden for so long despite a massive manhunt would be virtually
impossible without others assisting him. Being a true loner and remaining
unnoticed for years is one thing. Being one of America's most wanted
criminals and remaining unnoticed takes support, a group effort, and cannot
be done alone.

THE UBIQUITY OF the 1-word in the press today owes itself largely to its
ubiquity in the burgeoning realm of criminal profiling. This crime-solving
methodology was pioneered by FBI agents in the 1970s, and draws on a
combination of crime-scene evidence and precedent to establish lists of
likely characteristics for as-yet-unidentified suspects. As the twentieth
century drew to a close, profiling captured the public's imagination. This
owes a bit to the Oscar-winning 1991 film, The Silence of the Lambs, in
which a convicted cannibal helps an FBI agent profile a wanted killer. But
no doubt it springs, too, from America's growing fixation on crime. With a
terror of kidnappers, pedophiles, serial killers, and terrorists gripping the
collective heart, a desperate need arises for saviors --latter-day Hercule
Poirots and Sherlock Holmeses who use their brains to deduce, track, and
apprehend. Hardly a major unsolved crime is covered in the media today
without profilers being interviewed, being implored to aid the search.
Featured on numerous TV dramas and offered in university courses around
the world, profiling has become an increasingly popular career option.

Critics call profiling mere guesswork. They protest its use of race as a
defining factor. Caucasians are as offended by the FBI's announcement that
the anthraxer is a white man as African-Americans are outraged at being
pulled over just for driving in the "wrong" neighborhood. Yet in the lexicon
of profiling, loners take incredible heat. It is us, loners-who, me? yes, you-- -
whom profilers peg proforma as serial killers, bombers, arsonists, and
assassins.
PRo111.1.RS CREATE why + how = who equations. They take into account
such givens as victims' background (friendships, habits, work); details about
a crime scene such as its location and condition; objects missing from the
scene or added to it by the perpetrator; and forensic findings such as DNA
and bloodspatter analysis. Other clues taken into account are any that might
suggest an offender's gender, race, language, and style of dress. The premise
is that patterns exist and that certain types of people commit certain types of
crime.

And serial killers, profilers say, tend to be white male loners between twenty
years of age and fifty.

A sweeping statement. And a damning statement.

And a statement based on assumptions that contradict the true nature of

loners.

A high percentage of serial killers have suffered some form of childhood

abuse. Often they were raised by alcoholic, violent, or incestuous parents.
Such experiences might understandably make an individual spend much
time alone, but not necessarily because he is a loner. Instead, abuse typically
creates shame and anger emotions keyed inextricably with other people, with
their reactions. Abuse survivors might yearn to connect, but fear the pain of
revelation and rejection.

Growing up in severely dysfunctional families makes kids secretive. It is

never a good idea to invite classmates home when Daddy is on a bender.
These kids isolate themselves not for the joy of it, as loners would, but as a
defense against ridicule. It is their fear of the reactions of their peers that
drives them into solitude. Moreover, growing up in such households might
damage a child psychologically. As we have seen, mental illness isolates
adults, though it does not necessarily mean they are loners.

A typical profiling Web site cites "traits that seem to be universal" among
serial killers. These include "disorganized thinking, bipolar mode disorders,
a feeling of resentment towards society brought on by their own failings,
sexual frustrations, an inability to be social or socially accepted." Here is a
classic description of the pseudoloner whoyearns for acceptance yet fails to
receive it.

The Web site of an instructor who teaches criminal profiling at the university
level expands on this picture of what he calls "psychologically harmed boys"
whose horrific childhoods have rendered them "unable to develop the social
skills that are precursors to sexual skills and that are the coin of positive
emotional relationships." The instructor uses the terms "loner" and "serial
killer" interchangeably: "By the time a normal youngster is participating in
an active social life, the loner is turning in on himself and developing
fantasies that are deviant. The fantasies are substitutes for more positive
human encounters.... All the murderers knew that they had not had normal
relationships, and they resented not having them; it was this resentment that
fueled their aggressive, murderous behavior."

If we look at some of the last half-century's most famous serial killers at

actual cases-we find that they are anything but loners.

Charles Manson had a rough childhood. His mother was a prostitute-but

Manson grew into a manipulative, social adult who surrounded himself with
suggestible minions. Ted Bundy, who also had a rough childhood, was able
to murder as many as thirty-four young women largely because of the good-
natured charm he displayed when coaxing them into his car or into other
lethal situations. John Wayne Gacy, whose father was a violent alcoholic,
killed some two dozen young men by using his social skills to persuade them
that he would find them jobs in the construction business. Gacy, who
performed in a clown costume for hospitalized children, was a community
activist and a leader in the junior Chamber of Commerce. The Jaycees
elected him Man of the Year. Andrew Cunanan, whose bloody cross-coun- at
the university level expands on this picture of what he calls "psychologically
harmed boys" whose horrific childhoods have rendered them "unable to
develop the social skills that are precursors to sexual skills and that are the
coin of positive emotional relationships." The instructor uses the terms
"loner" and "serial killer" interchangeably: "By the time a normal youngster
is participating in an active social life, the loner is turning in on himself and
developing fantasies that are deviant. The fantasies are substitutes for more
positive human encounters.... All the murderers knew that they had not had
normal relationships, and they resented not having them; it was this
resentment that fueled their aggressive, murderous behavior."

If we look at some of the last half-century's most famous serial killers at

actual cases-we find that they are anything but loners.

Charles Manson had a rough childhood. His mother was a prostitute-but

Manson grew into a manipulative, social adult who surrounded himself with
suggestible minions. Ted Bundy, who also had a rough childhood, was able
to murder as many as thirty-four young women largely because of the good-
natured charm he displayed when coaxing them into his car or into other
lethal situations. John Wayne Gacy, whose father was a violent alcoholic,
killed some two dozen young men by using his social skills to persuade them
that he would find them jobs in the construction business. Gacy, who
performed in a clown costume for hospitalized children, was a community
activist and a leader in the Junior Chamber of Commerce. The Jaycees
elected him Man of the Year. Andrew Cunanan, whose bloody cross-coun try
killing spree ended with the shooting of fashion designer Gianni Versace,
was a notorious partygoer and social climber whose fondest dream was
fame. Wayne Williams, convicted of killing dozens of children in Atlanta,
had been spoiled and doted on as a child. Williams was a gregarious,
energetic music promoter who ran his own radio station and who secured
victims' trust by telling them he was a talent scout. The list of sociable serial
killers goes on and on.

IT'S NOT JUST serial killing. As profilers would have it, loners are up to a
lot of other mayhem as well. In fact, if they are to be believed, we are far too
busy hunting and hurting others and burning down their houses to have any
time left to ourselves.

A profile issued by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police warns that "stalkers
exhibit these common behaviours": substance abuse, a penchant for violence
and for threatening others, possession of weapons and, of course, "loner,
outsider behaviour."

In its official profile of a type of sex offender known as "the Gentleman

Rapist" more talkative, insecure, and nerdish than his muscular counterpart,
"the Power Rapist"----the National Center for Women & Policing warns that
"this offender ... is probably seen as ... gentle, quiet, and passive" and "is
considered a loner. His solitary pastimes include reading, watching
television, and surfing the Internet."

On a Christian Web site, a list of "Typical Satanism-Related Crimes"

includes "Murder (fairly rare, and essentially by loners)." Good to know.

THE FBI's JOHN Douglas is hailed as one of profiling's pioneers, and today
is in great demand as one of its spokespersons. In his book, The Anatomy of
Motive, coauthored with novelist Mark Olshaker, Douglas plays fast and
loose with the 1-word, often using it to describe perpetrators whose behavior
and motive indicate anything but a true loner.

On the day in 1996 when a gunman massacred sixteen children at a Scottish

school, Douglas was asked on TV to profile the as-yet-unidentified killer. In
his book, the profiler recalls what he told the interviewer: that the shooter
would be "an asocial loner" who was "very, very angry" because "no one
will listen" to him. It is not loners but outcasts who are angry when no one
listens to them, yet Douglas went on to describe this "loner" as a malcontent
who believes that "he has nothing of importance left in his life.... The entire
community is to blame, his entire peer group is at fault." When the gunman
was subsequently found, he was very angry---about having been dismissed
from his post as a Scout leader, and about his neighbors' unkindness to him.
Pedophile and creep though he was, Thomas Hamilton was also wholly
outer-directed. He wanted company inappropriate company, perhaps, but
company nevertheless.

Douglas also recalls the case of a mental patient whose hobby was "sticking
hundreds of pins into naked Barbies." This man, the profiler explains, "was a
coward and a loner ... taking out his anger and frustration about the way he is
by punishing a fetish representative of what he aspires to but can never
have." Again, this mistakes the reject for the loner. The man's act is a protest
against his hated isolation.

Then come arsonists and bombers. Crimes that do not involve face-to-face
confrontation tend to be perpetrated, Douglas believes, by "the loner, the
asocial who has to put emotional distance between himself and everyone
else" and is "among the most cowardly of all." He describes one Washington
State firebug as "a loner" yet also, in the same passage, describes this man as
"very lonely." Before his arrest, the arsonist had spent much time socializing
in bars. A letter he wrote in jail noted that it had been "very painful to lose
so many valued friends" as a result of his conviction.

Another non-face-to-face case for which Douglas was consulted involved

the discovery that someone had been secretly urinating into bottles of the
liquid with which workers cleaned their computers in a busy office.
Developing a profile of the mysterious urinator, Douglas speculated on the
sort of employee who tends to go in for sabotage: "Is he always sitting by
himself at lunch?"

This profiler is not finished with loners yet. "Assassin personalities tend to
be white male loners with self-esteem problems no surprises there," Douglas
declares. He cites a San Antonio gunman who began firing at random into a
crowd during a parade. The gunman was a truck driver "an inherently
solitary profession," Douglas notes. (As is the composing of songs and the
writing of novels.) Moreover, the killer's landlord "characterized him as a
quiet loner."

This killer was ill. Suffering from paranoid delusions, he believed the CIA
was after him, and he had been struggling with severe post-traumatic stress
disorder ever since surviving a bad road accident. "The mere fact that
someone keeps to himself doesn't mean he's going to be an assassin
personality," Douglas offers. Well, thanks! "But without having anyone
around to observe him, you don't know if and when he might become
dangerous."

LAW ENFORCEMENT HAS evolved over time. For one thing, police no
longer employ phrenology, the study of cranial bumps, as a means of
identifying criminals. Will loner-bashing, too, become merely an artifact, a
sad thing of the past?

Dean Wideman hopes so. The Houston-based consultant has worked on

thousands of cases nationwide involving the collection, preservation,
examination, and analysis of forensic evidence. Wideman asserts that in his
business the 1-word is far too often "too loosely applied, or even misapplied-
--and the foundation for using it isn't always there." In failing to specify
what they mean by "loner," he tells me, profilers and the reporters who quote
them don't take into account the finer textures that might better aid the
identification process. For instance, "at what point is [the criminal] a `loner'?
Is he always alone or is he only alone around the time he does the crime? I
try to stay away from that term myself," Wideman says. "In fact, I don't even
think I've ever put it in any of my own reports. Investigatively, I've found
that it doesn't add any value although," he admits, "people do like to see it.
They want to get the idea that [the criminal] is not somebody who's
integrated into society. But the reality is often the exact opposite. A lot of
killers are real social people whom you couldn't describe as loners even
generally. It's rare even in my research for me to come across an actual
loner."

Internationally known forensic scientist and criminology instructor Brent

Turvey agrees. "Most FBI profiles which are published in the paper include
the archaic suggestion that the offender is a loner who lives with his mother,
and this is simply not always or even commonly the case. The profiles are
quite commonly incorrect. The bottom line," Turvey notes, "is that most
offenders have social connections until they are apprehended and then
everyone deserts them. Offenders like Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy
had lots of friends and very extensive social lives until they were arrested."
It was only then, Turvey points out, that "nobody wanted to be associated
with them. Hence Dahmer, for instance, was considered some kind of social
outcast, which is simply untrue."

In her work as CEO of the Sexual Homicide Exchange, a Minnesota

nonprofit dedicated to closing unsolved sex-murder cases, Pat Brown
constantly finds it necessary to "dispel profiling myths," as she puts it. "I
disagree that serial killers and psychopaths are loners," notes Brown, a
profiler and investigator herself. Those neighbors so ubiquitously quoted in
crime articles declaring that a certain suspect was a loner "are saying that
simply because they were not in the creep's circle of acquaintances. For that
matter, since neighbors hardly know each other anymore, that description
could probably be used to fit a good half of the neighborhood. If he isn't a
hell-raiser," Brown points out, "he gets called a loner."
It is true, she adds, that perpetrators she encounters in her work "tend to have
a tough time keeping any kind of real friendship going. They use people,
abuse people, and therefore most folks tend to distance themselves from
them. Often it is said of suspects that they didn't get along with coworkers or
have any close friends. Most of the time that's true. Once in a while you get
a rare person completely separating himself from society-but that makes it
much more difficult to stalk and abduct people. Many serial killers are
married, are parents, are gregarious and friendly. They are also liars, weirdos
and psychopathic manipulative failures. To sum it up, the term `loners' is
erroneous.

Reality is just one letter away.

`A loser who has a limited circle of people who will put up with him is more
accurate," Brown says. "Losers, yes. Loners, no."

FOR THREE WEEKS in the fall of 2002, a mysterious sniper was picking
off victims in the Washington, D.C. area, seemingly at random. A terrified
nation waited breathlessly for the killer to be caught. During the wait,
profilers were called in and predicted that the sniper would be a white loner.
Though they were dealing with an utterly baffling case, there was consensus
on that point. Asked to characterize the shadowy figure who was wreaking
havoc on his state, Maryland's governor announced, "It's a loner." An article
on ABCNEWS.com was headlined, "'Evil': Forensic Psychiatrists Say Sniper
Is Likely a Self-Absorbed Loner."

But when the investigation was over, it had netted not one white man but
two African-Americans. The elder, Gulf War veteran John Muhammad, was
twice married and a father of three. Those who had known him expressed
shock at his arrest. Muhammad, after all, wasn't a loner. "We played
neighborhood ball together," an old friend told the International Herald
Tribune. `John was cool." Muhammad's first wife told Britain's Mirror that
the killer "enjoyed company."

The New York Times promptly called this case a prime example of profile
glut. "Criminal profilers were the perfect filler" in newscasts during the
spree, "always ready to offer an insight when the action lulled." The case
was also a prime example of how wrong profilers can be.
"So much for the Chevy Astro van," smirked the International Herald
Tribune. 'And the twenty-six-year-old white loner."

But the matter would not rest. Articles appeared claiming that Muhammad
and/or his teenage accomplice were "by all accounts" loners, despite
previously published accounts that they were not. Loners would not be let
off the hook. The press and the public wanted so badly for these killers to be
loners.

A few days after the suspects were apprehended, the New York Times
speculated on the nature of this kind of crime. "These days it is increasingly
difficult to figure out who is a terrorist or what that even means. Terror-as
opposed to terrorism may be inflicted by any loner with a vague political
grievance and a gun." The message in the sniper case, the article concluded,
transcends the fact of who these particular snipers were. "Leaderless
revolutionaries, one-man armies, lone wolves angry at the world: you don't
need a plane or a bomb to terrorize America," the Times mused. `Just one
gun."
1 3.
bizarre as i wanna be
IECCENTRICITY]
You might think you're the most ordinary person in the world. The world
begs to der.

oNVARD HUGHES is the subject of a lot more books and films than
J. Paul Getty is. Both men were immensely rich. But about Getty, personally,
all most Americans know is his name. Tell-all books about him do not clog
the shelves of the biography sections in public libraries. There are quite
likely no published descriptions of Getty straining on a toilet. Of Hughes,
however, such details are readily available.

Similarly, we know and care little about the intimate moments of J. P.

Morgan or Cornelius Vanderbilt. Their names conjure little in our minds
beyond the chill of bank vaults and the thud of moneybags.

But Hughes: The billionaire aviator's name inspires shudders, giggles,

clenched shoulders, as if his famous paranoia were contagious. References to
Hughes and pictures of him pepper the legendry of vintage Hollywood. He
makes cameo appearances in the works of L.A. Confidential author James
Ellroy. In the twelve years before he died in 1976, Hughes lived as a hermit
in the Beverly Hills Hotel. Accompanied only by bodyguards, he sat all day
in a semidark bungalow. During those years, he avoided the public eye
fiercely. Photographers were not permitted near him. His corporation
demanded hefty fees of any newspaper that dared to print his name. While
the other hotel guests played in the pool and strolled the grounds, Hughes sat
in solitude brooding about germs and Russians.

Billionaires, as such, are interesting only up to a point. To the masses who

find Hughes interesting, he is so not just because he was a billionaire, but
because he was an eccentric billionaire. Not merely an eccentric billionaire,
but a reclusive one. Crouching amid stacks of film canisters in that
bungalow, ordering steaks from room service every few days but fasting in
between, he is the classic American icon of eccentricity. He was an eccentric
loner, a loner eccentric.

IT HAPPENS. S'T'AYING apart from others-a lot, a little renders us

different. On bad days we are called crazy. On better days, though still not
good ones, we are called eccentric. There is virtually nothing you can do
about it. There is no escape.

Are you eccentric? Webster's New World Dictionary defines the word, which
derives from the Greek ekkentros, off-center, as "deviating from the norm."

Perhaps you say no way. You know yourself as ordinary, even dull--a wage
slave with kids and taxes and a Toyota. But we will not escape the raised
eyebrow, the watchful neighbors who whisper about us. She never has
anyone over! His bedroom light is on at the strangest hours! Being a loner
might feel natural for you. It might seem nothing, might seem normal
compared to some of what is taken for granted in America: tongue piercing,
for instance, or eating ground-up spleens and eyeballs cooked in casings and
called hot dogs, or keeping an arsenal of automatic pistols in the living
room.

And yet even the dullest loners have been called eccentric just for being
loners. Those loners might be surprised to hear it, irri- tated--Do I look like
Howard Hughes to you? The loner in the plain white shirt and khaki shorts
eating at Taco Bell is lumped together with the odd duck who lives up a tree
and talks only in iambic pentameter. We need to come to terms with this. If
you are a loner, whether you sleep on a bed of nails or a queen-size Sealy
Posturepedic beside your perfectly ordinary partner, chances are that
someone sometime will call you eccentric. Whether you like it or not.
Whether or not you think it is fair.

IN A LANDMARK study launched in 1984, Dr. David Weeks of the Royal

Edinburgh Hospital set out to examine the nature of eccentricity.
Interviewing well over a thousand acknowledged eccentrics from both sides
of the Atlantic, Weeks explored how these individuals perceived themselves
and how, throughout their lives, they had been perceived by others. As his
research progressed, certain characteristics surfaced which most of his
subjects seemed to share. No matter how disparate the manifestations of
their eccentricities whether they dressed exclusively in Crimean War
uniforms or collected hundreds of lawn gnomesthey had, Weeks found, a set
of traits in common.

Most were either the only or eldest children of strict parents. Most had vivid
imaginations, were idealistic, and wanted to help make the world a better
place. Since childhood, they had recognized themselves as different.
Noncompetitive, opinionated, curious, intelligent, creative, these were
classic nonconformists. Largely because they felt no need to compete, they
were notably calm and stress-free and robustly happy. Most had offbeat
eating or living arrangements. Most had hobbies and most loved a good joke.
Many were single and, Weeks found, most were loners.

He was particularly concerned with determining whether distinctions could

be drawn between eccentrics and the mentally ill. They can and solitude,
Weeks found, has much do with it. Eccentrics use their solitude very
constructively, which Weeks calls the single best indicator of mental health.
(It is possibly Weeks to whom Dr. Raj Persaud, quoted earlier in this book,
refers when he marvels that some in his field laud the ability to enjoy time
alone.) By contrast, the mentally ill suffer and are much worse off when left
alone, Weeks writes. More evidence of mental health among eccentrics is
that they see themselves as different, but feel no compulsion to change.
Mocked, they regard the mocker as the one who has a problem, not
themselves. Sticks and stones.

"Simply put," Weeks concludes, "neurotics are miserable because they think
they're not as good as everyone else, while eccentrics know they're different
and glory in it." Rather than feeling helpless or driven, "eccentrics act
wholly according to their own will," the doctor found, "and for the eccentric
it is a positive, pleasurable experience."

Weeks's conclusions apply to eccentrics in general but also to loners

specifically. Imaginative, curious, engaged in hobbies that's us. Making
excellent use of solitude-that's us. Creative, sense of humor, sure. Uh-oh.

WHETHER MANY ECCENTRICS are born loners or whether it happens

when they learn, as small children, that others do not share their penchant for
eating breakfast at 3 A.M. or keeping hornets as pets is a question for the
nature-or-nurture department. But not all eccentric loners are treated alike.
Some, like Hughes, trigger derision. Others- Emily Dickinson again are
hailed as heroes. Cruelty to some and kindness to others reflects the mob's
motivations and favorite prejudices.

The eccentric loners who are admired or at least bemusedly tolerated are
those who are perceived as having something to give. Poets, artists,
musicians, scientists when now and then they emerge from their cocoons,
they bring beauty, entertainment, or inventions. They sing for their suppers.

Howard Hughes, who suffered from severe obsessivecompulsive disorder,

had nothing to show for his solitude. No ouevre, no anthem, not one single
transcendent thing. His solitude was a closed circle, shut on itself like the
mythical snake that swallows its own tail, the ouroboros. Impatient as
Hughes frittered away his years at the hotel, the mob stamped its feet in
outrage: What is he doing in there? What has he got to hide?

They cannot bear being left out. Of anything of clubs, of games, of

conversations. Let me in, they shout, pounding on doors, often on principle,
often by instinct, when they do not even actually want in. It comes down to
the old saw that not sharing is not nice. Those who share are, by the rules of
the masses, good. Who, after a tornado has leveled every house in town but
one, would sit and watch his neighbors starve? Expecting to be shared with
is presumption, the myth of entitlement. Those not shared with feel furious
and hurt and grapple with the possibility that someone might not like them.
Thus loners, in general, who can be perceived as not sharing themselves, are
judged harshly. Thus, when it comes to eccentric loners, those who give
nothing are judged most harshly of all. They are given no quarter.

Hughes's solitude was "selfish," meant for no one, not an entertainment

paparazzi were not even permitted to "share" pictures of him with tabloid
readers, nor reporters stories of him. This is why he became fair game.

In his memoir, I Caught Flies for Howard Hughes, the magnate's former
bodyguard Ron Kistler describes Hughes's long, solitary stints in screening
rooms, where he obsessively stacked boxes of the Kleenex he believed
would guard him from disease. Dubbing Hughes "the king of the enema,"
Kistler recounts how his boss "sat on the toilet for 26 consecutive hours,
groaning and rocking back and forth." Other scenes recall Hughes's bad aim
in urinals, his dislike for bathing, his body odor, and his nasty domineering
personality. Whatever sanctity Hughes found in his expensive inner sanctum
drains away as his bodyguard reports on its dirty furniture, its heat, its odor,
and Hughes's sitting there stark naked save a hotel napkin draped over his
crotch.

THE VAST MAJORITY of eccentric loners, being loners, live and die
without ever becoming famous. But a few emerge into the limelight, their
genius attracting more attention than, as loners, they perhaps relish. Before
his death in 1925, the French composer Erik Satie, who collaborated with the
likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Serge Diaghilev, was a fullblown
celebrity surrounded by besotted acolytes. Yet he was forever a loner. As a
young man, he founded a church, L'Eglise Metropolitaine d'Art de Jesus
Conducteur, whose only member was himself. In his memoirs, the composer
described his singular diet: "My only nourishment consists of food that is
white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals, veal, salt,
coconuts, chicken cooked in white water, moldy fruit, rice, turnips, sausages
in camphor, pastry, cheese (white varieties), cotton salad, and certain kinds
of fish (without their skin)." Even if he was exaggerating in an effort to be an
over-the-top Surrealist, it is an eccentric exaggeration.

Britain has always prided itself on breeding more eccentrics than any other
country and being more tolerant of them as well. "England is the paradise of
individuality, eccentricity, heresy," wrote the philosopher George Santayana.
Dame Edith Sitwell, herself born into a family of famous eccentrics,
declared eccentricity a peculiarly British trait, a national characteristic.

Tales are told of British aristocrats who never set foot outside their homes
for years at a stretch. One of these was Sir Henry Harpur of Calke Abbey,
Derbyshire, known during his lifetime in the eighteenth century as "the
Isolated Baronet." His reclusiveness was a family trait; one of Harpur's
twentiethcentury descendants was a lord said to have communicated with his
own children, who shared the house with him, solely by letter and never by
speech.
Sitwell has written of Matthew Robinson, Lord Rokeby, who after attending
Cambridge's Trinity College around 1735, became so fond of mineral baths
on a visit to Aix-les-Bains in France that he secluded himself on the family
estate in Kent and spent the bulk of his solitary days submerged in water.
Sometimes it was the sea, in which he would paddle till he fainted from
exhaustion. More often it was a pool in a green- houselike enclosure near his
mansion. His privacy guarded fiercely by a troop of cocker spaniels,
Robinson would float on the still surface with his waist-length beard wafting
around him.

His membership in the upper class one cousin was an archbishop-allowed

Lord Rokeby to escape most of the responsibilities that would otherwise
draw him away from his treasured privacy and what Sitwell calls his "eternal
baths." A few years later, another aristocrat, Captain Philip Thicknesse, also
went into seclusion at an estate near Bath which he called, significantly, St.
Catherine's Hermitage. It was here that Thicknesse wrote what he called "the
Hermit's Prayer," in which God is implored "that I may view with rapture the
inexhaustible volume of Nature, which Thou hast spread before mine eyes."
Ensconced in his self-styled hermitage, the old soldier indulged the sensation
of being the master of all he surveyed. He saw "the barks on the Avon,
which I considered as messengers whom I have sent forth to fetch me Tea
from Asia, Sugar from America, Wine from France, and Fruit from Portugal
... I have obtained," he wrote, "that which every man aims at but few
acquire: solitude and retirement."

During the eighteenth century, a fashion arose in which wealthy British

landowners hired hermits to dwell on their grounds. It was felt that these
hermits-for-hire lent the landscape an air of romance. "Nothing ... could give
such delight to the eye," Sitwell writes, "as a bearded `ornamental hermit'
clad in `a goatish rough robe, doddering about amongst the discomforts and
pleasures of nature."' Charles Hamilton set aside a quarter of his large Surrey
garden for the purpose. A treehouse-style hermitage was erected in
Hamilton's garden, supported high above the ground on cunningly contorted
stilts and gnarled roots. The hermit's sole possessions were to be a Bible,
spectacles if necessary, a pillow, a floor mat, and an hourglass. He was to
drink only water and subsist on whatever food was brought him from
Hamilton's kitchen. He was to wear a loose robe at all times, and cutting his
hair or nails or exchanging even a single word with any of Hamilton's
servants was cause for dismissal. Hamilton's advertisement offered the
hermit one hundred pounds a year, but payment would come only at the end
of seven years. Another advertiser, this one in Lancashire, promised fifty
pounds a year for life to a hermit who would occupy an underground cell
equipped with as many books as he desired. Hermits also placed newspaper
ads offering their services.

In the summer of 2002, a resident hermit was being sought for Shugborough,
a Staffordshire stately home owned by the fifth Earl of Lichfield, the royal
photographer. The advertisement specified that the hermit would be expected
to dwell in a cave on the estate, shunning all human contact, and would be
compelled to stay dirty and hairy-though the job was to last only for a few
days, a special "solitude weekend." During that weekend, the public would
be taken on tours of the grounds, including a visit with the hermit.
Applications poured in from as far away as Pakistan and Poland.

"This is the first time the job of a resident hermit has been advertised in
more than 250 years," Corinne Caddy, spokeswoman for the 300-year-old
stately home, told a reporter before the hermit was chosen. "We have been
stunned by the number of applications."

To many of those applicants, and to some extent the organizers of the job, it
was no doubt a lark, a joke. Would it seem so hilarious if instead of a hired
hermit the earl put on display a hired deaf-mute? A hired Zulu? Hermits are
still safe to laugh at. To puzzle over like beasts at the zoo. To peer at and
thus to invade, larking, the solitude for which they stand.

Most of us will never go all the way, will never be hermits. In fact, most of
us will never do much that is outrageously bizarre at all. Still, many of us
will be called eccentric. Just sitting around, we will. Unlike crazy, eccentric
cannot be quantified or certified. It is not used in courts of law They cannot
lock you up for it. So, no big thing. We have been called worse.
14.
the sleeve said
[CLOTHES]
They dress for success. They dress for sex. Clothes bare the soul, and thus
betray us.

-HEN I WAS just starting out as a journalist, one of my first stories

was about a nudist camp in a hot valley across the bay from San Francisco.
When making arrangements to visit, I had been warned that most of the
camp was off-limits to anyone clad in anything more than shoes and a hat. If
I wanted to see the swimming pool, the shuffleboard court, the volleyball
games, and the barbecue pit, I was told, I would have to undress.

This didn't bother me. However, it bothered everyone I told about my

imminent visit. Won'tyou be embarrassed?Aren'tyou scared?

Of what? Of being naked? In front of a lot of strangers? No. That no rolled

around and around in my mind like a billiard ball. It was so solid, so hard.
Yet it made no sense. The prospect of being naked with strangers somehow
had nothing to do with sex. I'm not an exhibitionist- well, not particularly.
Anyway I knew the camp was not a meat market. Strict antiogling rules got
offenders tossed right out on their naked heinies. Still, I would be naked in
public. Not just in some relatively empty place, either, and not in the dark,
but in the full light of day. It wasn't as if I had ever quite done that before.

So why was I gladly counting the days? Loner that I was, what bugged me
was not the prospect of the camp, but the fact of wanting to go there.

The afternoon came. Beyond the parking lot, over a creek, began a trail
barred by a woodburned placard, ranch-style, saying Clothes Cannot Be
Worn Beyond This Point. Mine slipped off in a sec. The camp's vice
president, who was my tour guide, slipped hers off as well, baring a pudgy
body fully browned. We strolled out to the pool, where a country-western
song was playing on someone's radio. Dozens of buttocks dipped and
bobbed: smooth, slack, flat, fat, furred. Figures lazed around the deck. Buff
and bronze. Aged and elephantine. Teenage and tender. One woman sipping
a cool drink bore surgical scars across her back like satin stitching.

Some waved. Some glanced my way but, I realized, only because I was
unfamiliar, not because I was wearing only a pair of eelskin sandals.
Instantly they went back to their dog paddles, their sunscreen tubes, their
crossword puzzles. Following my tour guide to the water's edge, I kicked my
shoes off. In the blue depths, I could see tufts of pubic hair blooming brown
and gold like sea anemones. Why, oh why, does this feel normal?

The vice president read my mind.

"Nudity," she said, palms together for a dive, "is the great equalizer."

THAT WAS IT. Not wearing clothes was not something to fear, but a relief.
A liberation-not from tight buttons or the specter of provocation, as nudists
and feminists will say, but, for a loner, from so, so much more.

As a signal of civilization, dressing is taken for granted. It is not a question

of if, but what. Down these millions of years, it has become so de rigueur, so
automatic, that many dress with amazing ease. They dress either without
thinking or with regal deliberation, relishing the gradual accumulation of
effects the way sovereigns must feel as silks and furs are drawn by servants
up their arms and fastened at their necks. Each cloth and pattern proclaims
some part of the body but, and more importantly, the body as the soul wants
it to seem. Dressing is an act. It is, tacitly, a relationship. In any case, besides
dressing purely for warmth, it is an intercourse.

This is me! cries the pant leg, the collar, the sock. Clothes prepare wearers to
be seen. They are a uniform for an army of one. They signify. They advertise
the self, package the self, offer up the self for inspection, for assessment, for
classification, for its fate.

For loners, then, the idea of dressing is self-betrayal. Ironically, dressing the
body means baring the soul. How can we reconcile the fact that nearly every
time we step outside, we are doing the utmost nonlonerish thing? Hey,
lookee here.
So what is lonerwear?

Some, perhaps without realizing why, wear outfits that hide them like tents.
Cargo pants, overcoat, oversize top. Nobody's here, just this big pile of
fabric. It works. So does dressing calculatedly like others, vanishing thusly
into the crowd. Both of these tactics work, solving the problem of how not to
tell too much.

But both, for some, cause other problems. Both are stealthy methods of non-
dressing: so lacking in apparent artifice that they might as well be nudity.
They work, but what of loners who love clothes, love their feel and cut,
know clothes as art? For them, non-dressing is a wasted opportunity, a
heresy. But for them, clothes are a never-ending dilemma, every sleeve a
double-edged sword.

Their nonloner counterparts, who know clothes as art, delight in dressing.

Theirs is a pure, directed delight. They know they will attract eyes. Strangers
will comment, will ask where the shoes were bought, laud the tie. They want
this. They are nonloners. They use clothes, as they use everything, to
connect.

The loner who looks fabulous is one of the most vulnerable loners of all.

ANDREA SIF ;Et., WHOSE book Open and Clothed explores how and why
people dress as they do, interviewed several loners while conducting her
research. "There can be something delicious," she told me afterward, "about
the private discussion that goes on between self and wardrobe. One of the
many advantages of being a loner is that often there's time to think, ponder,
brood, meditate deeply, and figure things out to one's satisfaction. That is not
as available," Siegel reasons, to those who must dress in a rush.

Some of her interviewees "were what I'd call `closet loners,' in the sense that
the persona they presented to the world did not reflect the kinds of clothes
they kept in their closets. In other words, they had alternate wardrobes for
unlived lives as represented by the evening gown for the gardener, the dress
for the male technical assistant, the ladies-who-lunch suit for the mother of
toddlers who always wore sweats. "These were parts of their unexpressed
selves."
GIVEN THE FACT that, by definition, no two loners are alike, you would
think there could be no possible thing as a "loner style." You would think.
"The eccentric has always been a style enigma," muses the text of a photo
essay in Paper magazine's fashion section. "No matter how hard designers
try, they're never able to emulate the look. Here are some inspired looks
from fashion's back door." Along with images said to depict the "Odd
Couple" and the "Quirky" dresser is a dramatic photograph captioned
"Loner." In it, a stick-slim model resembling Harry Connick, Jr. wears a
noirish black suit with matching shoes, tie, and hat askew- and a striped shirt
whose unbuttoned cuffs dangle, enormous, from the ends of the coat sleeves.

A Singapore-based fashion Web site offers a commentary on which colors

appeal to which personality types. "If you wear white," the text declares,
"you have a positive, well-balanced, and optimistic personality. You are
highly individualistic and a loner. You seek a simplified lifestyle free from
outside pressures. If you wear gray, you are very much an individual. Many
people may get the impression you are self-sufficient as you have excellent
self-control and prefer to remain uninvolved. Those who wear gray have a
tendency to isolate themselves" as compared with, in the commentator's
view, impatient but engaging orange-wearers and competitive red-wearers.

Nor can crime reporters resist using clothes in their attempts to characterize
and create a recognizable uniform for the homicidal psycho-loner. Much was
made of the Columbine killers' sunglasses and trench coats though, as we
have seen, their belonging to a "Trenchcoat Mafia" with numerous similarly
attired members rendered the two teens not loners, but pseudoloners. After
the middle-aged Norfolk farmer Tony Martin murdered a sixteen-year-old
Gypsy boy, Martin was denounced by British papers as a loner, yet also,
contradictorily, as lonely -appearing at a friend's home at all hours, aching
for company. Martin lived alone amid his apple orchards, reported the
Manchester Guardian, which added that the killer was "said to wear only
navy blue."

There is something, I confess, to a uniform. No guesswork, no decisions, no

variables. No personal data revealed. No provocations and no clues. Wearing
uniforms signifying certain jobs, enrollment in certain schools, military
status, and the like is to announce membership in a group. A mob. And thus
the opposite of all a loner stands for. Yet, at the same time, it lets a loner
disappear, just as we sometimes like to vanish in a crowd. Uniforms can be a
relief. They are a type of nakedness.

My husband has a policy with clothes. His goal, as a loner, is to make it clear
that his clothes mean nothing at all. That they make no statement about him.

They make statements, but not about him.

He wears beige cotton trousers and T-shirts. He buys the shirts at rummage
sales, during the last hour when prices plummet and he can stuff all he wants
into a grocery bag for a dollar. If a shirt is his size, if it lacks holes and
stains, he takes it. The picture or slogan on it does not matter. 't'hus his closet
is packed with shirts depicting mallards, slot machines, historic landmarks,
bottles of malt liquor. North Shore Surf Shop. UC Berkeley Engineering
Club. Club Med. Lowriders de La Canada. The logos of cell-phone
companies and defunct dot-corns and a magazine about bisexuals.

"If I wear whatever I pull from the closet, totally at random, it means I don't
care." Caring would imply making a fashion statement and, for him, being a
loner means being elusive, never letting others know what he is thinking. "If
the shirt says I'm bisexual or an engineering student or that I went to Ixtapa,
then that day whoever sees me will think that's what I am. The next day my
shirt will have a completely different message. So what am I? A dorky nerd?
A sporting guy? Hawaiian?" In the end, the conflicting messages all cancel
each other out, becoming a blur. And in that blur, unseen, unreadable, the
loner dwells.

I, on the other hand, have always had too many clothes. Many of them I get
cheap, as he does. So I tell myself this is not profligate, not pointless.
Thinking I loooove this! I picture myself in the platform shoes, the hot-pink
jacket. I will never wear them. They will hang forever, waiting in the closet
fruitlessly like sad clowns, while every day I seize the same camouflage-
jeans, ever-so-unremarkable striped shirt. All those lovely perfect things
with every passing year become less plausible for someone of a certain age
to wear. Skintight T-shirts printed with pictures of fried eggs, Pokemon,
goldfish. Rhinestone hairclips linger untouched in the bathroom, sparkling
like foreboding butterflies.
If I were smart, I would resist this impracticable urge to buy and, instead, act
like a Parisian: settling on one or two outfits that flatter and that neither say
too much nor nothing. On the other hand there are nude islands in the
Adriatic-I have heard of some, nudist banks and restaurants and all-where
loners can fill their closets with art supplies or sporting goods or CB radios
or anything but clothes.
1 5.
don't go there
[ENVIRONMENT]
We are happy living in one place, suicidal in another. We ought to figure out
why.

iROFESSIONAI, HARPOONERS AND cross-dressing flamenco

dancers feel more welcome when they live in some places than in others.
Loners, too, have much to lose or gain from the landscapes in which we park
our belongings. For us the warning signs might not be as obvious as those
for cross-dressing flamenco dancers or for intellectuals, gourmands, mixed
couples, dukes. We all too often settle, unsuspectingly, for hell.

First consider the broadest strokes, the backdrop. Should we live in the town
or the country?

Urban critics blast the anonymity of city life: the lack of eye contact, the
lack of conversation, the coolness with which big-city neighbors ignore one
another. Laissez-faire is an urban etiquette. City dwellers are too busy for
boredom to stop them in their tracks and make them curious about the new
tenant downstairs, the stranger walking a terrier in the park, the patron in the
corner booth, dining alone. This is why cities are where fugitives hide in
plain sight. And this is why loners who like living in cities like it.

The opposite living in a remote cottage miles from the nearest paved road or
shop-has its benefits, too. No casual visitors, no milieus in which one might
run into those whom one does not want to see. Some loners love the
countryside. It is a life of extremes, sacrifices, suited only to the very self-
reliant.

It is in between these two that loners often feel cornered. Small towns are
closed circles in which paths cross back and forth all day. It is an incessant
bumper-car ride. Hello, it's me again! In small towns, villages, and suburbs,
strangers recognize each other in the street, in stores, on line at banks and
offices. It would be rude never to nod, never to speak. Idle chatter is the
sound track to small towns, a music that drives most loners mad.

Many nonloners have a problem with city life. It makes them lonely. Ditto
country life. Lonely. They are happiest in that middle zone, buffered from
loneliness by the sight of familiar faces, the ease with which one can find a
willing ear, converse, connect. The knowledge of all those connections, low-
fi though they are, comforts the nonloner like knowing that a house has
electricity even when all its lights are off. Mathematically speaking, loners
are just the opposite. We thrive where population density runs to extremes--
the city with a thousand residents on each block and the countryside with
houses miles apart. The very aspects of city and country that nonloners fear
and despise are those that whisper to the loner, Welcome home.

Welcome to lonerland.

As FOR THE finer strokes, what sort of countryside, what sort of city, these
are personal decisions. With some mitigating factors.

Deanne Stillman spent ten years researching and writing Twentynine Palms,
her award-winning book about the murder of two young women by a U.S.
Marine in the titular Mojave Desert town. Having loved the emptiness and
freedom of the desert since childhood, the Midwestern-born Stillman came
to a deep understanding of it in those ten years. Desert rats, as self-effacing
locals call themselves, tend to share a lonerish outlook. Don't ask, don't tell.
Mind your beeswax. Prickly, prohibitive flora and fauna echoed the human
ethos. Stillman empathized with that.

"People go out there," she told me, "because they want to be left alone."
Some come for the cheap housing. But a lot come "because they're hiding."
Desert animals, like their human counterparts, know that heat can kill. For
both, hiding is second nature. In an ambience that freeways and phones have
done little to change since frontier days, "you're unchecked out there in the
desert," Stillman says. "You're not being tracked." Tracked by the law.
Tracked by society.

"People say the desert is desolate. Yet for me it's very much alive, full of
surprises. As soon as I see those wide-open spaces, I can breathe," says
Stillman. The desert's apparent emptiness, rich in hidden life, is a metaphor.
Joshua trees make stark spiked silhouettes against the landscape hinting in
their stillness at passion, like loners, Stillman notes.

Deserts as lonerlands offer comparatively few stimuli that demand a

response. A desert's colors and occupants and climatic variations are
relatively few. Its flat pastels and fuck-you climate make it "a haven for
people who can't function in cities," Stillman says. Yes, desert rats "will tell
you to go screw yourself. Yes, they want to be left alone. But for the most
part, they're happy." Adopting an unwanted spot where what wildlife there is
looks like blades, needles, knives, and swords, where stings are lethal and
the gila monster will not loosen its bite even after you sever its head, loners
feel safe. The desert is one dry, drawbridgeless moat. Seashores and forests,
by contrast, share a big disadvantage: Everyone you know will want to visit
you there.

FOR LONERS, TRAVELING means never staying anywhere long enough

for others to know us. In this way, it is a liberation. Hello, good-bye, without
expectations, without obligations. No guilt. Passing through. Or not saying
hello at all. It is an ideal state sometimes. You get all the advantages of being
somewhere, seeing things, living, walking the streets alone or eating in
restaurants alone, exploring and absorbing, and no one you know knows
where you are. You see just strangers all day.

When I was seventeen, I spent six weeks touring America with a busload of
other kids. I'd found the tour company's flyer in a travel agency and begged
my parents to pay my way. Shockingly, they did. It was not the same as
traveling alone-that wouldn't happen for another two summers-but all the
other teens were from other schools, other parts of L.A., so strangers to me.
As time wore on, we got to know each other, but they were all having so
much fun smoking and using their parents' credit cards to buy beaded
moccasins in Arizona, leather jackets on Fifth Avenue, and elk antlers in
Wyoming, that no one minded how I was. They did not require anything of
me. Some of them found me funny, silent all day. We shared rooms at night.
Other girls liked having me there. It was rather like having no one there.
Partway through the trip, votes were taken: best-looking, most likely to
succeed. I was voted most easygoing.
For me, every day was encyclopedic. I could not believe so much could be
seen. Petrified forest, bayou, gulf, Mount Vernon, Custer's blood-soaked vest
at the Smithsonian--taran- tulas, June bugs, cockroaches, fireflies if I could
have stayed up all night every night, I would have.

The night of the fireflies it was Alabama the tour leader came to get me. A
sturdy freckled redhead, probably the age I am now

Come with me, she said. Leading me by the hand into a corridor. Then when
we were alone: I'm worried aboutyou.

Why? Blinking.

Because you're depressed.

I laughed. I'm not.

No need to cover it up. You'll feel better if you just cry.

I don't want to cry.

Would you like to call your folks?

No!

Well, what else can I do? There's no life in your eyes.

Except that it was the happiest six weeks I'd ever spent. When it was over, it
stopped with an awful shudder, like a boulder dropped from a height. Why, I
thought, do I ever have to stop moving?

As CITIES GO, each has its own current and flavor. All offer loners the
welcome opportunity to disappear into a crowd, but work, weather, and
politics help determine where those crowds are coming from, whether
they're mostly cool or mostly Fundamentalist or homophobic. And whether
they're clad in shorts and tank tops and smiling on grassy lawns most of the
year, or wrapped in overcoats and dashing indoors from the cold.
I have not lived in many cities, but can tell you that Los Angeles, for all the
cruel things people say about it, is a loner's paradise.

There are clues in those cruel things. The residents are shallow, you say?
Narcissistic? Hedonistic? Fine. To a loner, that means the residents are
minding their own business. Too preoccupied with mirrors, too busy
pleasing themselves to bother eyeballing the lone figure who does not wish
to be examined. As it is, the city has so much else to be looked at.
Billboards. Beaches. Stars. So much so that even the act of looking has an
etiquette about it. Smooth. Through lowered eyelids.

So much flagrant display leads to endemic blase. Only hicks stare. And in a
town of spectacles, of the spectacular, loners can mutter Hey! Look over
there! while slipping safely out of sight. There is in L.A. always something
to draw attention away from you.

Nor are most things in L.A. precisely real. The fact of everpresent artifice
makes for a million ready-made smoke screens and veils.

Sealing its fate as lonerland, L.A. is a freeway town. Virtually everyone over
the age of fifteen spends a large portion of every day and night in cars in
most cases, as the brown sky attests, alone. Freeways are mobile empires
comprising a million hermitages, each outfitted with its own array of
ornaments, its own music. In Joan Didion's novel, Play It as It Lays, much is
made of freeways by the protagonist Maria a loner who has trouble even
making conversation with anyone besides her sexual partner of the moment.

Life spent in cars affects the act of seeing. Through a moving window,
everything seems fleeting. Now you see whatever, now you don't. By force
of habit, those who spend their lives in cars tend to glance, rather than really
observe. Their eyes slide off you like a freshly cracked egg slides out of its
shell.

Weather makes a difference, too. When it immobilizes you, pins you at

home, you are a prisoner, a sitting duck. Then they can , find you. But mild
climates offer loners a handy escape route. On lovely days, no one can
assume you are at home. Unanswered phones, unanswered doorbells are not
so perplexing on a lovely day. You might be anywhere.
BECAUSE LONERS ARE born everywhere, we end up living everywhere.
We do not, have not, tended to single ourselves out

as special, elite, requiring rarefied environments. Too often we have done the
opposite; lived where we lived because our jobs were there, or families, or
because we'd heard the schools were good there, or that we would love a
place with changing seasons. Then, no matter what, we put our noses to the
grindstone. We take living there as a fait accompli, a fact. Too often we are
miserable somewhere without realizing why. We blame ourselves for not
buckling down, settling in, fitting in. The problem is the place, but too often
we do not see this, we will not allow ourselves to see this. It's the same old
thing: This is a friendly town, so what's your problem?

Asthmatics are better off in arid climates. Gays and lesbians feel more at
home in San Francisco than Riyadh. To the nonloner, or the self reproaching
loner, the fact of being a loner is not comparable to those other determinants.
It is not a matter of life and death, we tell ourselves. It is not a matter of
breathing or of execution by stoning. But home is the crucible of living.
Homes have living rooms. So how can living not be a matter of life or death?
1 6.
absolutely, totally alone
[SOLO ADVENTURERS]
They call us geeks and scaredycats. Let's see them sail around the world
alone.

'E SAY wE are loners. But how alone, most of the time, are we?
Aloneness comes in stages, degrees, like those science lessons in which a
cross section of the human body is projected on a screen and the teacher
removes transparencies, one by one, so that first the renal system disappears
and then the respiratory system. Then the cardiovascular, reproductive, and
digestive systems. Then the muscles go. Circulatory system. Brain. Until
nothing is left but bones.

Alone-in-a-crowd we know best of all. We feel it nearly every time we set

foot outside our front doors. The environments taken for granted as most
normal, most mandatory- -school and office, church and club, restaurant and
public-transit sys- tem--are guaranteed to make us feel alone in a crowd.
Faces fill the entire scene, a repeated motif, like polka dots. A swarm of
arms, so close you sometimes touch them. Not on purpose. Brushing past,
bumping.

Even this first stage can be further subdivided into crowds you know and
crowds of strangers. Do you recognize those polka dots? Must you
acknowledge those brushes and bumps? Must you speak? In this sense,
school is one way and subways are the other.

Alone-in-a-crowd can give curious comfort, like a swath of pillows. It has

color. Action. Stuff to see and overhear. And we can disappear. The bigger
the crowd, the less chance you will be singled out.

The next stage is being alone out there just out of sight of others, though you
know others might appear any minute. Walking alone down the sidewalk of
a quiet street. Arriving at the beach before the other surfers.
The next stage is being alone behind walls- armor, either the steel walls of a
car or plaster ones at home. This is the safest stage of all, the most
controlled. It is the one in which lonerhaters think we spend all our time.
They picture us hiding behind our curtains, hurting, too hateful or mad or
cowardly to face the world.

Which brings us to another stage. The state of being absolutely, totally alone.
Being the only human life form for dozens of miles, hundreds of miles
around. The solitary creature up against the great unknown, the wilderness.
Weeks alone, all alone, so far from signs of civilization that you are truly on
your own. No one can hear you scream.

An expedition, mission, quest whose primary criterion is that it be done solo.

Sail around the world alone. Survive in the South Pole alone. It has been
done. Not by your average loner, not by anyone like me. There is solitude,
and then there is solitude. The real acid test. It has been met so who are they
calling cowardly now?

SIX HUNDRED YEARS ago, even the most adventurous travelers and the
hardiest loners drew the line at traveling alone. The unknown was truly
unknown, and in a very real sense Satan was held to be hiding around every
corner. Peasants lived and died without ever leaving their villages. Religious
pilgrimages were just about the only legitimate reason for traveling, and
pilgrims, as Chaucer could tell you, moved in packs. Explorers and
navigators had massive entourages. Sailing solo beyond sight of land before
the age of ship-to-shore technology was suicide. Even the most lonerish
loner might rather spend his life in a busy marketplace than venture out and
die.

To the modern loner, the increasing viability of solo travel is a dream come
true. Every railway in the world, every hostel, sees a constant stream of solo
travelers. It has become no big thing. Teenage girls do it.

The solo expedition, traveling beyond reach, is a big thing still and will
always be. To the loner, such an adventure promises epiphanies, wonders
never to be forgotten, elemental challenges, confrontations with the ultimate
and the self. Success or death. The very essence of a loner's life, larger than
life.
To nonloners, it promises epiphanies and tests as well, but of the opposite
kind, so they take up the challenge, too. To them the prospect of being so
absolutely, totally alone is horrific, the closest you can get while still alive to
hell. Thus, for both loners and nonloners, the test is of superhuman courage.
But for nonloners, the self reliance on which survival depends is a terrible
hardship thus momentous. For loners, the self'-reliance is bliss--thus
momentous. For nonloners, the victory is that of having survived torture. For
loners, the victory is that of having lived truly alone, thus truly lived.

BEFORE SI:'I ZING OFF to row alone across the Atlantic in 1969, John
Fairfax had had a wild life. His roller-coaster romances had been punctuated
by stints as a smuggler, a pirate, and an Amazon explorer. Yet a loner he
certainly was, and was not afraid to admit it.

Training in London for the voyage in which he would man a small rowboat
single-handedly from Gran Canaria to Miami Fairfax looked forward to
being at sea for months on end with only himself for company. Rowing on a
Hyde Park lake, he found that "on sunny days, surrounded by cheerful
couples and boatloads of kids merrily bumping into each other, I had trouble
concentrating.... I preferred the cold, windy, gray days, when I found myself
almost alone. My mind could then retreat into itself, tentatively tasting the
loneliness ... and liking it." His experiences up until that point, his brushes
with all manner of characters on water and land across three continents, had
made Fairfax "more than convinced that rowing across the Atlantic in itself
would be peanuts compared with my struggle against humanity."

He assessed that struggle with a wry and unapologetic humor. A less secure
man might have wasted his energy on selfdoubt or futile attempts to "fit in,"
but not Fairfax, who indulged what some might call disparate facets of
himself: athlete, happy loner, shameless show-off.

At sea, Fairfax slipped immediately into the carefree lifestyle that he had
anticipated so eagerly. Charting his course, rowing nonstop for hours at a
stretch, he was his own boss. Laziness or sloppiness and their repercussions
would be entirely his fault. Everything depended on him. A small human
being and a small boat seem smaller and smaller the farther out they go on
an open sea. Fairfax observed the changing weather, the vastness of water
and sky, the fishes that followed his boat: quintessential fullness and
quintessential emptiness all in the same stretch of horizon. Loners know this
feeling, the all that lies in seeming nothing, the vibrancy of stillness. Waking
with the sun every day, Fairfax came to realize what mattered to him and
what did not. Seeing no use for the synthetic measurement of time, he threw
his only clock overboard. He did not despatch his transistor radio, but
scorned it, switching it on for shorter and shorter periods each day and
sometimes not at all. A sailor who was less of a loner might have welcomed
even batteryoperated companionship, but "I loathed having my solitude
shattered by the sound of human voices chattering," Fairfax would later
recall. "All I craved, and even this only now and then, was a good concert."
Even the diary in which he recorded his progress came to feel like a
hindrance. "I want to think," Fairfax complained to the diary itself. "Writing
simply spoils everything; it's like having company."

He missed his girlfriend. "It is not a thing I yearn for very often," he noted,
"but today I really wish I were home . . . a beautiful girl sprawled all over
me, purring. Gee, how many times I have done so and yet, at the end, I
always got bored with it and wished I were where I am now" After months
without human contact, Fairfax was invited aboard a passing German ship.
The German crew was kind and gave him delicious treats, but "the whole
episode struck me as odd and unreal," Fairfax reflected afterwards. "I very
much needed the goods they could supply me with; but once these had been
supplied I craved for the solitude that had been my own for so long." Back
on his boat, he felt only relief. "Loneliness" was for a loner like himself not
"a specter to be feared, but more a cherished companion without whom I
was at a loss." So much so that, spotting another ship a few nights afterward,
"I switched off my torch, lest they see it ... and watched it disappear."

SAILING ITSELF Is a lonerish pursuit, sweeping the sailor away from land
and all it represents. Sailing solo is one step beyond. The San Francisco Bay
Singlehanded Sailing Society a recreational club that stages solo boat races
between San Francisco and Hawaii is one of many such clubs around the
world.

"The running joke," says solo sailor Rob McFarlane, "is that it's the club for
people who don't have friends. It's a racing club, not a social club."
For McFarlane and the other members, sailing alone "is the best way to
travel. It's like breathing. It's absolutely normal. You don't even think about
it. Everything is on your own terms, and you get to sidestep all those
`people' issues that get in the way" when a crew is involved.

McFarlane used to do the crew thing, but it wearied him. "People would
show up late and be all grumpy, and that spoiled it." He still relishes the day
he bought an autopilot, which makes a crew unnecessary. Today he lives
alone on his boat in a marina and commutes to his job at a nearby lab.

On a long solo voyage-the Hawaii jaunt takes about fifteen days---solo

sailors face the problem of leaving their vessels unguarded while they sleep
at night. Club regulations urge members to "keep a sharp lookout at all
times," though this is pretty much a contradiction in terms if one is to sleep
at all. There are ways to illuminate a boat so that larger vessels can see it
from some distance away, but absolute vigilance around the clock just isn't
possible.

"Either you get run over or you don't," McFarlane shrugs. "You're risking
basically everything. It's up to you whether you choose to think of it as
stupidity or as fun."

He knows which it is for him. During Hawaii runs, he tosses a "dinner line,"
a fishing line outfitted with large lure, over the side. Bobbing in the wake,
the lure attracts tuna and mahimahi--dinner.

"People always ask, Aren't you scared of sailing alone?"' McFarlane says.
"Well, if you're good company for yourself, you're going to like it. If you're
not, you're going to hate it. I've never been good with people." Sailing solo
"means you're not dependent on anyone to enjoy anything. And it's a total
blast. It's unbelievable."

GERARD D'ABOVILLE was one of those who was going to hate it. When
he decided to row solo across the Pacific in 1991, solitude stood out in his
mind as a handicap, a hardship akin to storms and sharks. The Frenchman
was no loner. Waiting in Japan to begin the sojourn that would land him,
four months later, in Washington State, d'Aboville steeled himself "to
grapple with my own solitude ... before it seized me in its own invincible
grip." His sense of dread was further reinforced by port officials, the press,
and the public in Japan, a nation "where individual exploits are uncommon,
where group decisions are the rule"-and where as a result the very idea of his
project "ran into a stone wall of incomprehension."

"I have chosen the ocean as my field of confrontation, my field of battle,"

d'Aboville wrote, tellingly applying a military metaphor. "I am a resistance
fighter in a war I invented for myself.... The enemy is me."

RICHARD E. BYRD was no loner, either. Yet when a group expedition

turned into a solo engagement, the celebrated Arctic adventurer came to see
merits and marvels in solitude that were --for him utterly unexpected. An
adventurous admiral whose exploits were magazine fodder for an
enthusiastic public, Byrd elected to establish a weather station deep in the
Antarctic, near the South Pole, in 1934. A team of hardy men was originally
to occupy the Boston-built hut along with Byrd, but the last minute found his
would-be companions turning back and Byrd settling in alone. And thus he
stayed for four and a half months, as temperatures outside the hut dipped to
83 degrees below zero. Even a lifelong loner would find such surreal
conditions harsh. Byrd could only describe the early days of his adventure in
the most sepulchral terms. Sunk in "a funereal gloom," he speculated that
"this is the way the world will look to the last man when it dies."

But time changed that. Byrd became meditative. "Harmony, that was it! That
was what came out of the silence ... a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect
chord.... I could feel no doubt of man's oneness with the universe." Just as
the sailor John Fairfax would observe aboard his tiny boat on the Atlantic a
generation later, Byrd in his chilly hut discovered that "I wish very much
that I didn't have to have the radio." Day by day, he was learning many
things that nonloners seldom learn. They neither wish to learn these things
nor ever are, as Byrd was, forced to learn.

"My thoughts seem to come together more smoothly than ever before. . . . I
am better able to tell what in the world is wheat for me and what is chaff,"
the admiral observed. "Solitude is an excellent laboratory in which to
observe the extent to which manners and habits are conditioned by others. A
life alone makes the need for external demonstration almost disappear ...
when I laugh, I laugh inside; for I seem to have forgotten how to do it out
loud. This leads me to think that audible laughter is principally a mechanism
for sharing pleasure." It sounds remarkable, coming from the pen of a
celebrity whose charm was a fulcrum for his fame. "How I look is no longer
of the least importance; all that matters is how I feel." Byrd later called it "a
great experience" despite a ventilation problem in the hut that nearly killed
him. "I felt more alive than at any other time in my life," he declared in his
memoirs, "my senses sharpened in new directions, and the random or
commonplace affairs of the sky and the earth and the spirit, which ordinarily
I would have ignored if I had noticed them at all, became exciting and
portentous."

FOR HIS BOOK, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, the novelist Gabriel
Garcia Marquez interviewed Luis Alejandro Velasco, who had been a
crewman aboard a cargo vessel that sank abruptly off the coast of South
America. Velasco, who made his way to a life raft, was the sole survivor. His
solitude was not only unplanned, but also was spawned by tragedy. Nor was
Velasco a loner. He told Marquez how much he had enjoyed his crewmates'
companionship, what a team they had been. Floating on the raft just after the
sea closed over the sunken ship, "I thought it would take them at least two or
three hours to rescue me," Velasco recalled. "Two or three hours seemed an
extraordinarily long time to be alone at sea."

But the hours stretched into a whole night. As darkness spread, Velasco
believed "I wouldn't be able to overcome the terror." Then at daybreak, "the
sea's surface grew smooth and golden." To the sailor's surprise, "for the first
time in my twenty years of life, I was perfectly happy."

GROWING UP AMID the green hills and wild, rocky shores of the New
Zealand countryside, Naomi James savored being a loner. Nor did her first
trip abroad, a solo stint in Europe soon after finishing high school, change
anything: "I liked the feeling that being alone in a crowd gave me. I liked to
feel myself apart from the people and their worries," she later recalled. "I
found that I preferred not knowing anyone." Biking around Austria, "I spoke
to no one."
When, in 1977, James set out to sail single-handedly around the world, old
salts warned her that the route she had chosen entailed months at a stretch
with no hope of human contact. "To most people," she observed, "the most
daunting feature of this voyage would have been the length of time spent
alone. To me that wasn't important at all. I don't even have the patience to
talk over the trivialities of life with people" under ordinary circumstances,
on land, which "has driven me to prefer silence because I don't have the
strength of mind or the lack of manners to tell people I'm bored to death."

At sea, she was contented with just a cat for company. Pragmatic after the
cat was swept overboard to its death, and after she herself sustained injuries
during an accident, James shatters the image of the loner shackled by
melancholy, nursing every sorrow. Mishaps tested her, and she bobbed to the
surface emotionally and physically every time. Fond as she was of her
faraway fiance, another solo sailor, "I'm a natural loner because as long as I
know that Rob is alive and well I don't really worry about him. He has his
life to live and I've got mine, and if I can survive then I'm sure he can."
Throughout the voyage James displayed courage, a defiant optimism that she
carried like a flag even after her boat capsized several times and, single-
handedly, she righted it. While relatively unafraid of the open sea, "I have
always been slightly afraid of other people," she confessed in her account of
the voyage, "imagining that they are looking down at my faults and finding
obvious inadequacies. I feel that I am out here," James explained, with a
loner's logic, "to escape criticism ... to prove that I am a rational, self
dependent and capable human being." It is onshore, among others, she
wrote, that the real pains and perils lie. Processing these gave James a
purpose, a goal that demanded more bravery and led to a grander
accomplishment than ordinary people can imagine. Aboard, alone, "I
succeed or fail by my own endeavours without any influence from the
outside world."

After a two-and-a-half-month stretch with no human contact, James was

thronged by reporters as she sailed into Cape 'Town for supplies. One
journalist "asked me if I was glad to see people again," James confessed,
"and I'm afraid I pulled a face."

Many nautical miles and near misses later, the voyage was done.
"I was," James concluded, "never ever bored."

WHAT ii you were alone at sea? How would you do? What would you do?
What if you were marooned? Once in a newspaper I saw a tiny article about
a woman who had been rowing in the South China Sea, got lost, and wound
up on a tiny islet, where she survived for three weeks by eating toothpaste
before being rescued. She had lived in the dorm room next to mine at UC
Santa Barbara. I kept wondering what she had thought about all those days
under the turquoise satin sky, feet in the sand. Most of us will never be that
alone. So alone that even all our fantasies about being alone, our desert-
island dreams and Captain Nemo dreams and Twilight Zone dreams of
depopulated towns in which we wander, loose-limbed, picking what we need
off store shelves-would be revealed as cartoons, counterfeits. There is a real
thing.

Solo adventurers are our version of Olympians. Of Nobelists or Green

Berets. Elites. Showing the world what loners can do. Loners at their bravest
and sanest and strongest. Buff loners. Loners who laugh at death.

And who prove that not only they but we are not afraid of the one thing that
is for nonloners one of the scariest. It frightens admirals. It is solitude and
we are not just unafraid of it, but love it. We are totally at home in it, as
pilots are at home in the sky and sailors at sea. Solo adventurers reveal that
in this arena we win, we kick nonloners' asses and when the ship wrecks, we
will survive.

They are our proof. They are legends in real life whose sagas should be
required reading for every new loner generation. Archives that can comfort,
inform, inspire. Are we all recluses? Failures? Wimps? We can be heroes.
1 7.
smiling bandits
[CHILDHOOD]
For fear of raising little killers, parents persuade little loners to play
volleyball.

N WINTER VACATIONS in desert towns, I paddled back and forth

across motel pools, peaceably alone. I floated on inflated rafts. I dove for
dimes I threw myself. I did handstands, holding my breath. I acted out
scenarios in which I was cast overboard from pirate ships or was a dugong. I
would glide, submerged, alone, glassy sunbeams slicing the shallow end.

In pools, the idea of needing playmates was especially ridiculous. Around

me other kids, siblings and strangers to each other, formed phalanxes for a
day, head-butting and cannonballing, caroling Maaarco. Pooolo. So it was
that after I had played alone for ten minutes or so, my mother would come
up and seize my swimsuit strap.

Swim up to that kid this instant and say hi.

To who?

To someone. That girl. Anyone.

What for?

Because they'll all think you're weird if you don't.

Who cares? I'll never see them again after to-

Get the hell over there.

So I would go. Watching my mother watching me.

Hello, my name is-

I played. I was not all there, but I played. At sunset, the families toweled
themselves dry and went back to their rooms to change for dinner at the
smorgy.

On vacation and at home, I played alone if I could get away with it. Playing
alone means never being forced to put Barbie and Midge and Ken through
halfwit dialogues somebody else thought up. Playing alone means never
having to play someone else's favorite game.

MY FRIEND JANE remembers her childhood, like mine, spent very much
alone. She had three siblings, and the neighborhood was full of kids.
Sometimes she joined a game but mostly she went wandering alone.
Strolling to Sav-On or the vacant lots, climbing a giant elm and reading
every last Hercule Poirot mystery.

Looking back on that, Jane marvels. She has three kids of her own now and
marvels at how much has changed since she charted her singular course
across her own youth. Children's social lives today are almost wholly in the
hands of grownups. The informal, magical spontaneity with which Jane
shaped her afternoons back then has been replaced with the rather clinical
convention of playdates, in which kids' rendezvous are arranged days or
weeks in advance by their parents.

"This playdate mentality,"Jane seethes. "It really bothers me. It isn't natural."

Jane's eleven-year old, eight-year-old, and four-year-old do not wander the

neighborhood as she did, or play in the front yard or the street. Nor do they
play alone. Instead, they make lists and submit them to her, stating which of
their classmates they would like to see after school. From a photocopied
chart sent home by their teachers, including all the students' addresses,
phone numbers and parents' names, Jane calls the mothers of the children in
question so that dates and times can be arranged. It must be planned in
advance: at whose home the kids will play, and who will drive whom where.
This is the price we now pay for a world that seems no longer safe, where
kids are plucked from their trikes and pulled into hell. Parents face all sorts
of new fears: Will their children be attacked by criminals or become
criminals themselves? Will their children be lonely, be loners, or be too
socially inept to grow up and get jobs?
All elements of chance are taken out of it, Jane says, and once the kids are
brought together for a playdate, they are watched by the adult whose home it
is. Afterwards, when the visiting child's mother or father arrives to collect
him, the adults discuss what the kids did. First they played with their
Gameboys. Then they had a snack. Then they watched cartoons.

It's awkward, Jane says, and contrived. But also the vigilance bothers her,
"the hovering parent constantly ensuring that everything is going fine."
Combined, it puts all social interac tion onto a microscope slide, controlled
and watched. It enforces the concept of right and wrong ways to socialize.

And not socializing is not an option.

You WOULD THINK parents would be pleased with a child capable of

entertaining him- or herself. Think of the advantages. Such a child learns to
be resourceful, independent, learns to concentrate. Playing alone, a child will
not get into fights. Solo pastimes hone creativity. Reading. Writing. Crafts.
Acting out dramas in which the lone player must devise the plot, portray
every character, come up with costumes and a denouement. You would think
parents would appreciate this. You'd think they'd be grateful. But they're not.

Parents today are all too well-versed in tales of friendless children who grow
into murderers.

One day in March 2001, San Diego-area high-school student Charles

Andrew Williams sprayed his classmates and school administrators with
gunfire, killing two and injuring a dozen. Papers in the aftermath ran a quote
from a classmate calling Williams a "loner type." It was an echo of the
coverage following 1999's Columbine shootings, after which papers
promptly called killers Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris the 1word. The day
after the shootings, the Seattle Times called both boys "loners, misfits."

But the mislabeling of pseudoloners as loners which affects adult criminals

applies to youthful ones as well. Some kids, like Jane and me, like to play
alone. Others, on the other hand, are outcasts.

Charles Williams wanted acceptance. He strove to impress peers with his

bass-playing and skateboarding, but his efforts backfired. They teased him
for bragging and for not being very skilled. The BBC reported that kids at
school had called him names: dork, freak, nerd. Days before the shooting,
Williams told classmates what he was going to do. One of them reportedly
sneered, accusing him of being too much of a coward to go through with it.

Klebold and Harris were not quite loners, either. The "Trenchcoat Mafia" of
which they were the leaders numbered as many as fifteen kids who affected
attention-getting garb and habits: black berets and sunglasses, copies of
Soldier of Fortune, Nazi salutes. A far cry from the little loner floating
calmly in the swimming pool.

In a less fearful era, little loners did not worry their parents. Then again,
those were times when kids were considered best seen and not heard. It was
expected that they should amuse themselves. William Morris, who
throughout his solitary youth was close only to his sister, was impassioned
instead with forests, gardens, flowers and birds -which would be his favorite
subjects when the adult Morris became a poet, an artist and one of his era's
most prolific designers.

It is different today. Don't he shy comes the chorus from parents, teachers,
counselors, coaches. Dr. Mel Levine, childhood expert and author of A Mind
at a Tinie, has said he receives numerous queries from parents worried about
a child who always plays alone. The parents, Levine says, make a point of
asking the child to go out and play with others, to no avail. So they come to
him asking, "How hard should we push?"'

Levine wisely tells them that the answer depends on the child. Some kids, he
says, play alone by choice, and some do not. And even the choices of the
small should be respected.

So the bully or the sad-sack outcast is not the same as the child who chooses
to play solo games. The first two have a problem. The loner has no friends or
few friends not because of failure or bad behavior but because he chooses so
carefully. Loners can play well with others-the right others, maybe just one
other. Certainly not tons of others, picked for them at random.

Children are not born with social skills. They must be taught to say please
and thank you. Loners should learn these things as well as others should, if
not learn them even better, so that later in life their politeness and empathy
can get them through sticky situations.

BUT WHAT ARE parents to do when everywhere they look are warnings
that they might be raising psychopaths? One Massachusetts clinical-case
manager, interviewed for her local paper, offered a list of "warning signs for
violent children and adolescents." On the list, typically, was "isolation, being
what is known as a loner." Yeah, but that could also be on a list of ways to
identify a genius.

Gifted children walk and talk at an early age, have vivid imaginations, high
powers of concentration, love to read, and spend a significant portion of their
time alone. Parents who fear raising snipers might be raising composers.

AND THEY MIGHT be doing everything they can to keep such children
from becoming what they were born to be.

In his book, The Blank Slate, MIT psychology professor Steven Pinker
confronts the nature-versus-nature question. Firmly on the "nature" side, he
decries the conviction-dominant in the West for the last several decades-that
babies are born "blank slates" whose eventual talents and tendencies are
solely products of their environment. The idea that children are born equal in
every way, and equally malleable, has in Pinker's view wrought incalculable
damage.

"The 1990s," he writes, "was the Decade of the Brain and the decade in
which parents were told they were in charge of their babies' brains. The first
three years of life was described as a critical window of opportunity....
Parents of late-talking children were blamed for not blanketing them in
enough verbiage." He quotes Hillary Clinton's declaration that the first three
years "can determine whether children will grow up to be peaceful or violent
citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive or detached." There is,
Pinker warns, "no science behind these astonishing claims."

By contrast, he cites research evincing that "all human behavioral traits are
heritable" that is, genetically determined, inborn. Such traits, as discussed
elsewhere in this book, include amiability or disagreeability, aptitudes for
language, and the like. As profound an orientation as lonerism surely counts
among them as well.

Thinking of children as blank slates, Pinker writes, "can make us forget they
are people."

Thus, when parents force or persuade, which is the word nice parents with
nice kids use for forcing-little loners to join sporting teams or the Scouts,
they think they are writing on blank slates. The result, as adult loners know
who have lived through Little League, can be disastrous. Catcalls.
Alienation. Feelings of failure. The presumption that kids together are happy
kids is like the presumption that all plants need the same amount of water.

Too young to defend themselves too young to realize what it is about them
that requires defense little loners go along with the game. Wanting to please
parents who say This is for your own good, they pick up the bat. And part of
themselves, deep down, switches off.

In Bluebirds, I did not learn what they wanted me to learn. I did not have the
fun they wanted me to have. This went on for years-from Bluebirds into
Camp Fire girls.

Largely in an effort to raise stronger, more self-confident girls, the past

decade saw an unprecedented rise in the profile of female athletes and
athletics. Not just girls' teams but boys' and coed teams abound: in 2002 it
was estimated that more than 20 million American children were enrolled in
some kind of out-of=school sports program. While this is fine for many
energetic, social kids, it is a nightmare for the quarterback who wants to be
home, reading Madeleine books or building a robot.

Team time, for loners, is wasted time. The minutes tick away. Lost. Stolen.
Minutes that might have been fun, minutes spent feeling normal. Stolen.

WHEN PARENTS ARE in charge of children's social lives, and when

parents know that networking leads to success, they enforce networking
from the cradle onward, now more than ever, whether it suits the individual
child or not. Parents are "so determined for their children to be popular," my
friend Jane complains, and so certain that they can finesse that popularity by
making the right phone calls, that some mothers she knows keep track of
how many play dates their children attend from year to year: "They worry if
the number drops." Ditto for birthday parties. Some of these parents "are so
insistent," Jane says, "that they'll eagerly arrange playdates with kids they
don't really like and that their kids don't even really like. It's the contact that
matters." Constant contact, fueled by fear. "The current wisdom," Jane says
sepulchrally, "is: Never let your kids be alone."

She often hears other parents fretting when their children wish to play alone.
The parents wonder whether this is a sign of depression, a danger sign, a cry
for help. Jane knows better.

"My daughter likes to be in the basement alone and skip around the room
conversing with people who aren't there. I hear her laughing and I can't help
but think, I wish she was a normal kid instead. Her need for people is really
low-dosage and she'll just come out in the middle of a play date and say she
wants to leave. At eight years old, she already perceives herself as weird. `I
know I'm different,' she says."

Jane's eleven-year-old son is careful about what he says to whom. He has

only one good friend, and spends hours alone at the computer keyboard,
writing stories. One day during a play date, the child he was visiting invited
him to spend the night. Jane's son called her to say he was going to stay. But
something in his voice "made me suspicious."

So she asked him whether he had been invited while the other boy's whole
family was watching. He said yes. She asked whether he had accepted the
invitation so as not to hurt the other boy's feelings. He said yes. She asked
whether the boy and his family were standing there still, watching her son
make this phone call.

His voice came across jerky and high, a tone some might call cheery but
which Jane recognized as shrill.

Yes.

And would you rather come home instead?

r. yy. yessss.!

"I got his classmate's mother on the phone," Jane says, "and I made up a lie.
I told her he needed to be here because his grandmother was visiting.
Anyway, it worked. I went over and picked him up. When we drove off, he
sobbed as he was thanking me."

Because he is a conscientious child, Jane worries that all his life he will
agree to do things that compromise his nature.

She also hates play dates for a reason that has nothing to do with her kids'
welfare. This time it's personal: play dates force Jane to interact with a lot of
other parents when she'd rather be alone. Typical was one night not long
before we talked when a mother, arriving at Jane's house to pick up a child,
sank onto the sofa for a long chat. She and Jane had never met before that
night. Jane had nothing to say. She sat there thinking of the plans she'd made
for the evening-dinner, then work, then a cable show--which were now on
hold.

"Kids' friendships aren't just theirs anymore," Jane says. "They become
ours." Watching the stranger on the sofa, Jane was watching the clock.

"I thought: I can't believe the price I'm paying for my little girl to spend a
few hours playing with somebody. Would I do her such a great disservice if I
said, `Why don't you stay by yourself in the backyard and play with the
dog?'"

As most loners have learned to do, Jane smiled politely and waited for the
chat to end.

"I seem friendly." She scowls. "But this voice inside me is shouting, `No!
Don't make me do the play dates!' It's a terrible responsibility."

EVEN THE MOST lonerish child has relationships, of a kind, with toys.
And synthetic as they are, mass-produced and heartless as they are, toys can
still teach loners and nonloners a lot.

The standard toy for little girls the cliched toy is a doll. One girl, one doll.
This image has changed much over the last several decades, sparked by
feminism and other forces. But it is a boys' doll whose evolution holds
crucial messages for loners.

Girls' dolls impose a mother-and-child dynamic- or, in the form of fashion

dolls like Barbie, impose fantasies about how the child hopes someday to
look. Such motivations would be useless in designing dolls for little boys.
Thus, G.I.Joe had to be more than something to cuddle, something to stare
at. He had to inspire action or, at least, a fantasy of action.

Appearing in American stores for the first time in 1964, G.I. Joe stood
twelve inches high and wore combat fatigues. He was an unprecedented
success. In that first year alone, the Hasbro toy company sold six million of
him. The first-ever male action figure had struck a chord. And he was an
indefatigable loner.

Soldiers are team players on the battlefields of the real world. So toy soldiers
had always been small and were sold squadrons to a box. Joe was different.
Lacking companion dolls, Joe embodied the American fighting man as bold
explorer, swift decision-maker, problem solver, lone wolf. Sold alone, he had
to fight alone and, for the sake of his own popularity, had to make it look
worthwhile and fun.

Creating scenarios with only a single doll validates the power and wonder of
the individual. Even if this is only a molded-plastic individual with painted-
on hair and a mass-produced costume, it is a vessel through which the child
projects his own visions of himself as an independent thinker, doer,
adventurer, and winner. With only a single doll, the child celebrates self-
reliance, learns to strategize, and learns the most potent lesson of all: The
doll or the real person the doll represents- requires nothing in order to do
things and have experiences. Its adventures are sparked and carried out
through ingenuity, imagination, creativity. In playing with a single doll, the
child discovers how to entertain himself. A lone doll gives the message that
one is enough.

But America's romance with G.I. Joe turned sour in the 1970s, on the heels
of the Vietnam War. It was then that an entirely new type of toy eclipsed the
bold soldier and, coincidentally or not, made his self-reliance appear
outdated and obsolete.
Anticipating the release of George Lucas's first Star Wars film in 1976, the
Kenner company produced action figures based on its characters. Han Solo,
Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, the robots it was a numbers
game. Rather than release a single doll, the company released a whole
ensemble of interrelated dolls. At under four inches high, each doll
commanded a smaller retail price than G.I. Joe. This, it was hoped, presented
customers with yet another reason to buy the dolls in large quantities,
collecting the whole ensemble.

It was a risk. But Star Wars' astounding popularity ensured huge sales for
Kenner, which on the basis of these dolls soon soared to the top of the
American toy industry. Some ten years after the film's release, the company
had produced well over a hundred different models and vehicles, and had
sold hundreds of millions. Other companies followed its example, and today
tie-in toys appear with the release of every Hollywood blockbuster intended
for young audiences. Often tiny versions are given away free at fast-food
restaurants as teasers for the full line of products on sale at stores.

This has changed the way children play.

Action figures give a wholly different message than a soloadventurer toy

like G.I. Joe. At the most basic level, they inspire a restless desire for
quantity, more. One is never enough. One is ridiculous, pathetic, incomplete.
And playing with an ensemble of toys might theoretically teach social skills
such as cooperation, but it also limits each doll's putative abilities. It
pigeonholes them, diminishes each of them, diminishing the individual. This
is exacerbated by the fact that action figures replicate specific characters in
famous films. They not only have names, but also quirks and pasts and
dialogues. Their personalities come predetermined, known already by the
child even before she plays with them. So much for creativity. So much for
strategy. It is as if tie-in toys were designed to train children how not to be
loners, not to think as loners, not to like loners or understand loners or shop
like loners.

Trying to keep up with the times, Hasbro eventually launched a new line of
assorted characters to accompany G.I. Joe. A female intelligence ace, a
snow-combat specialist-- he's not a loner anymore.
Yet another type of toy has eclipsed action figures. Computer and video
games are most often played alone. Thus, social critics lambaste them for
turning today's kids into pallid, overweight isolationists. At first glance,
these electronic playthings might be seen as "loner toys," but are they really?
Yes, solo protagonists playing these games dispatch villains, solve problems,
and blow things to bits. But the player hardly needs to think, only to click.
Hours go by in a kind of daze. The child has not created a unique character,
story; dialogue, or situation. In this sense, clicking away, he is even worse
off than he would be with a boxful of Star Wars figures. Playing this way, he
is cut off even from himself.

CHU.uIu N, WARNS STEVEN Pinker, "are not indistinguishable lumps of

raw material waiting to be shaped." On the contrary, he asserts, we are all
born with personalities. If tampering with those personalities was counted as
a criminal offense, then its rates would be preternaturally high today and
soaring. It is perpetrated every day in countless households by well-meaning
adults who have no previous criminal record. These smiling bandits pick up
their phones, make dates, add names to rosters or sign-up sheets. They buy
small uniforms and smile. Wounds gape that will never close, or will mend
crookedly. Or with scars. And the grownups say I did not know it was a
crime.
afterword

7E WAS A loner all his life. As a boy he fled the swarming

Ltenement for "nature walks," as he called them, at Sheepshead Bay and
Coney Island. He had one friend -a cousin, actually--but they parted ways at
fifteen. None followed. He was a loner in the war, happy alone working
night shifts in tropic outposts with the Signal Corps, the South Pacific sky
like sequined velvet hung over a satin sea.

He was a loner learning electronics, suffering in office towers after the war
and company cafeterias, happy left at his desk with the door closed. Happy
at home in the backyard, tending the bougainvillea with its papery pink
bracts, the spider mums, the succulents that thrived in salty soil and asked
for nothing. He was happy in his garage, spending Saturdays polishing
stones, sawing wood, making jewelry, making furniture, the radio on. Leave
me alone. He gave the bookcases and pendants away, then rushed back to the
garage, shutting the door.

He was happy on the road, driving down some desert highway or over a
mountain pass. If he tried hard enough, he could forget that he was not the
only person in the car.

His only child, I, too, preferred closed doors, preferred the road, bristled at
interruptions, shut out all distractions, abhorred kits when things could be
made to one's own design. His only child, I, too, preferred eating alone,
wearing clothes it did not matter if no one saw, the beach when no one else
was there.

Not that I knew it then. Not that we ever said anything of the kind. He was in
his garage working the saw, listening to Mantovani. I was in my room gluing
doll eyes and pipe cleaners to seashells.

When he had a stroke, I was grown up. I flew back to Los Angeles.
"He can understand everything we say," the doctor intoned at his bedside.
My father was twitching, rigged to tubes, babbling gibberish. "He just can't
speak properly. Because of what has happened to the brain, he can't
formulate responses and just talks nonsense, but he understands."

My mother nodded slowly, horrified. Her eyes darted like fish.

"Will he-?"

No one could say. And as the day went slack, the January sky gone royal
blue and nurses rolling carts with dinner trays, but not for him, who ate
through tubes, I saw that alone could mean many things. My mother was
alone now in an awful way, was already alone, rendered alone the instant his
vessel misfired. And her aloneness would go on, would resound like the
bells in that poem by Poe. There is a kind of alone when you miss someone,
I realized, someone in particular. Most alones are grand; he would have said
so himself if he could say something besides theswitchisontheladderisababa.
But there is a kind of alone that can be hell. Don't you think I know that?

And what about him? He knew. He knew exactly what had happened.

The nurse had taken his bifocals and shut them in a drawer. His right arm
was clenched in a rictus like when children mimic horses. The other lay limp
against his hip, an aspic stillness.

"You'll be fine," my mother said.

He gabbled a phrase that sounded like "chuckburger."

His sister Roz was there. She kept calling him baby brotha.

The nurse said, "Gosh, he looks healthy."

"He spends lots of time outdoors. He spezzt," my mother said.

We sat in chairs around the bed, sharing Chex from a box. My aunt
straightened his blankets, turning to me.

"Have a baby."
"What?"

"I said, will you please have a baby."

To fill in the missing space, she meant. Because if my father died there
would be too few people in the world, one less, make more, fill it up.

I massaged his feet. The nurses had said it was worthwhile to keep his
muscles toned, in case. His soles were soft as chamois. He jerked, fussed,
looking the same yet different, as if being portrayed by a clever actor. My
aunt unwrapped an Almond Joy bar. "There's a candy machine down the
hall. If anyone wants candy, there's a "

I scooted my chair up to the head of the bed from the loot.

"Dad," I whispered. "Can you hear me?"

beezisindabakeryrr.

"Dad?" I touched his forehead. He jerked and said the clearest thing he had
said since the stroke, the clearest thing it turned out he would ever say.

Leave me alone.
endnotes
INTRODUCTION
"his outward appearance": Carl Gustav Jung, Psychological Types
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 134.

1. • VILLAGE PEOPLE

"an unacceptable return": Richard Critchfield, Villages (New York: Anchor

Books, 1991), 9.

"immensity of African space": Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Shadow of ' the

Sun (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 19.

"no chance of surviving": ibid., 31.

"disposed to the other": ibid., 29.

"misfortune, perdition": ibid., 49.

"This is impossible": ibid., 109.

"curt replies, if anything": Tim Nollen, Culture Shock! Czech Republic

(Singapore: Times Editions, 1997), 32.

"know your neighbors": ibid., 35.

"keep a low profile": ibid., 36.

"Unlike many cultures": Patricia Levy, Culture Shock! Ireland (Singapore:

Times Editions, 1998), 14.

"an essential history": ibid., 53.

"there is relentless pressure": Boye De Mente, Behind the Japanese Bow

(Chicago: Passport Books, 1993), 40.

"spending more time alone": editorial, Mainichi Shimbun, July 11, 2000.
2. • LISTEN TO US

"the means of communication": Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure

Class (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 69.

"much more complex": Wendy Cavenett, `Jurgen Vollmer: An Artist's

Progress." iGallery, April 1998.

"I'm full of dust and guitars": Jenny Fabian, " Fond memories of a crazy
diamond who shined." The Age, January 21, 2002.

"not living in a field": Interview with Paul Breen, Syd's brotherin-law by

BBC Radio One DJ Nicky Campbell, October 27, 1988.

"room full of chowderheads": Gina Arnold, "There's no replacing Paul

Westerberg." San Francisco Examiner, April 23, 2002.

"building something slowly": David Wild, "Axl Speaks." Rolling Stone,

January 10, 2000.

"a kind of male Garbo": Dave Kindred, "When baseball mattered the most,
no one mattered as much as Joe DiMaggio." The Sporting News. com, 2000.

"arrogant, ungrateful athletes": David Whitley, "Pure Hitter: Ted Williams."

ESPN.com, August 27, 2002.

"Not everybody liked him either": Bob Nightengale, "How do you like me
now?" USA Today, July 3, 2001.

"enjoy the show": Bob Carter, "Bonds lets his numbers do the talking."
ESPN.com, October 3, 2001.

3. • DO YOU FEEL LUCKY?

"Who wants to be reminded": Tim Grierson, "One Hour Photo: Only the
Lonely." Knot, September 29, 2002.

"hoary movie archetype": Stephen Holden, "The Postman: Neither Snow,

Nor Rain, Nor Descent to Anarchy..." ..Vew York Times, December 24,
1997.

4. • MARLBORO COUNTRY

"$1.09 worth of cola": Bob Garfield, "How Coke Advertising Has Lost Its
Way." Advertising Age, February 18, 2002.
6. - JUST CATCH ME
"sexual predators are loners": Bill Briggs, "Best dating-service advice: Be
careful." Denver Post, May 2, 2000.

"the crack cocaine of sex": Mike Santangelo, "Internet is a good place to get
an STD." United Press International, July 25, 2000.

"a wondrous love": Sharon K. Elkins, Holy Women of T,celfth- Centurr

England (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 26.

"a lifc-enhancing state": Alexander Avila, The Gilt of Shyness (New York:
Fireside Books, 2002), 27.

"those who date a shy person": ibid., 44.

"the gift of listening": ibid., 46.

"the worst thing you can do": ibid., 207.

"being a quirkyalone": Sasha Cagen, "The Quirkyalones." To-Do List, June

2000.

7. • POWER SURGE

"their tendency to ostracize": Patricia Kitchen, "Introverts Struggle to Fit

Into An Extroverted Workplace." Aewsdqy, June 23, 2002.

"on personal references": Nancy Senger, "Exceptional Service Takes the

Cake." Business Solutions, December 1999.

"if they're sociable or not": Jeff Zbar, "Secrets of a virtual company CEO."
Network WorldFusion, April 30, 2001.

"Keep score": R. Bruce McFarlane, "How to Gung-Ho Your Orthodontic

Office." Clinical Impressions, volume 8, 1999.
"do not want to conform": Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class
(New York: Basic Books, 2002), 77.

"most of the technological": ibid., 172.

8. • THE DIVING BELL

"Mr. Munch hates all contact": New York Times, February 14, 1937.

"a grand solitaire": Frank Elgar, Mondrian (New York: Praeger Books,
1968), 182.

"as our ancestors did not live": Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
(1934. Reprint: New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1994), 127.

"very little is published": William Roberts, Five Posthumous Essays and

Other Writings (London: Valencia, 1990), 71.

9. • SINGULAR GLAMOUR

"the secret of my whole existence": Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the
Sea (1873. Reprint: New York: William Morrow Books, 2000), 23.

"never to speak of them": ibid., 22.

"greater solitude or silence": ibid., 24.

"pursue a female wolf": Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (1929. Reprint: New

York: Owl Books, 1990), 42.

"how could I fail": ibid., 30.

"without wanting to": ibid., 77.

"this fear of people": Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice (New York: Schocken
Books, 1973), 279.

"We are social beings": Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution
of Language (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), xvi.
"I'm a loner, an individualist": Sinda Gregory, Toshifumi Miyawaki, and
Larry McCaffery, "It Don't Mean a Thing, If It Ain't Got That Swing: An
Interview with Haruki Murakami." Center for Book Culturc.org.

"refused to communicate": Paul Alexander, Salinger (Los Angeles:

Renaissance Books, 1999), 236.

"met us at the driveway": ibid., 295.

"leave me alone": ibid., 268.

"feeding tetchy disdain": ibid., 298.

JO. • JESUS, MARY, AND JENNIFER LOPEZ

"there is not a door": Jacques Lacarriere, The God-Possessed (London:

Goerge Allen & Unwin, 1963), 100.

"a shower of arrows": ibid., 118.

"once and for all": Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England, 152.

"She shall hold it": Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981), 52.

"I had to escape": Toni Maraini, Sealed in Stone (San Francisco: City Lights
Books, 2002), 42.

"this world of evil": ibid., 123.

"stole my space": ibid., 50.

"be truly recollected": Georgianna, 69.

"Such thoughts as these": Elkins, 158.

"and this is good": Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life (San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1997), 176.

"A few birds": ibid., 22.

"run to their shame": Thomas Merton, Learning to Love (San Francisco:
Harper San Francisco, 1997), 342.

"return to truth": Dancing, 175.

"I become anxious": Thomas Merton, The Other Side of the Mountain (San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1998), 252.

"Once in a while": Dancing, 33.

"that is that": Learning, 68.

"The hermit crab": Kamo No Chomei, Hojoki: Visions of a Torn World

(Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1996), 67.

"openness to experience": Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York:

Viking Press, 2002), 375.

"I was drawn": Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, "The Baal Shem "Iov's
Sixteenth Birthday." Chabad.org

"Life as a hermit": Ernie Garcia, "Modern hermits turn lives around in

Yonkers." Journal News, August 11, 2002

11. • NEW DISORDER

"hacking Perl scripts": Steve Silberman, "The Geek Syndrome." Wired,

December 2001.

12. • THE L-WORD

"all the more baffling": "Typical or Terrorist? Teacher, Police Descriptions of

Plane Crash Teen Differ." ABCNEWS.com, January 8, 2002.

"Suppose that for a period": John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, The
Anatomy rf Motive (New York: Scribner, 1999), 287.

"any odd job": Adrian Havill, Born Evil (New York: St. Martin's Press,
2001), 140.
"is at fault": ibid., 17.

"a coward and a loner": ibid., 44.

"by himself at lunch": ibid., 145.

"no surprises there": ibid., 219.

"a quiet loner": ibid., 229.

"It's a loner": Tom Baldwin, "Sniper not likely a terrorist," The Trentonian,
October 23, 2002.

"A black sniper": Jeffrey Gettleman, `Arrests confound profiling `experts."'

.New York Times, October 25, 2002.

"So much for the Chevy": Jeffrey Gettleman, "Most clues and hunches
missed sniper suspect." International Herald Tribune, October 26, 2002.

"with a vague political grievance": Jeffrey Gettleman, "When Just One Gun
Is Enough." New York Times, October 27, 2002.

[ 13. • BIZARRE AS I WANNA BE

"glory in it": David Joseph Weeks, Eccentrics (New York: Kodansha Globe,
1996), 14.

"the king of the enema": Ron Kistler, I Caught Flies for Howard Hughes
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 200.

"groaning and rocking": ibid., 93.

"before mine eyes": Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics (New York: Vanguard
Press, 1957), 166.

"solitude and retirement": ibid., 165.

"pleasures of nature": ibid., 48.

[ 16. • ABSOLUTELY, TOTALLY ALONE

"My mind could then retreat": John Fairfax, Britannia: Rowing Alone
Across the Atlantic (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 31.

"my struggle against humanity": ibid., 22.

"All I craved": ibid., 149.

"it's like having company": ibid., 152.

"watched it disappear": ibid., 165.

"before it seized me": Gerard d'Aboville, Alone (New York: Arcade, 1993),
50.

"The enemy is me": ibid., 80.

"when it dies": Richard Byrd, Alone (Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1984), 74.

"I wish very much": ibid., 87.

"what is chaff": ibid., 160.

"exciting and portentous": ibid., 120.

"I was perfectly happy": Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Story of a

Shipwrecked Sailor (New York: Knopf, 1986), 25.

"I found that I preferred": Naomi James, Alone Around the World (New
York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979), 19.

"to prefer silence": ibid., 71.

"He has his life to live": ibid., 98.

"I pulled a face": ibid., 101.

17. • SMILING BANDITS

"attentive or detached": Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate (New York: Viking
Press, 2002), 86.
"fighting and praying": ibid., 375.

"make us forget": ibid., 99.

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 Table of Contents
party one
party of one
• introduction •
1. • village people • 1
2. • listen to us • 21
3. • do you feel lucky? •
4. • marlboro country •
i have to go now 66
6. • just catch me •
7. • power surge •
8. • the diving bell •
9. • singular glamour •
10. • jesus, mary, and jennifer lopez •
11. • new disorder •
12. • the 1-word •
13. • bizarre as i wanna be •
14. • the sleeve said •
15. • don't go there •
16. • absolutely, totally alone •
17. • smiling bandits •
• afterword •
• endnotes •
• bibliography •