As the Holidays Approach

Elul, the month that leads directly into the High Holiday season, should be ideally devoted to the thoughtful, principled introspection that can serve as the foundation upon which the spiritual work of the whole holiday season should then come to rest. And that only makes sense: to come before Judge God and successfully to negotiate the experience requires, at the very least, knowing yourself well enough to speak honestly and authoritatively on your own behalf and in your own defense. And that level of self-awareness comes to most of us, possibly even to all of us, solely as the result of the kind of wholly honest self-scrutiny that yields the unvarnished truth about ourselves and our lives.

The problem is that most of us find any sort of serious self-analysis off-putting, unnerving, and, to say the very least, deeply anxiety-provoking. And yet, that is precisely what otherwise halcyon Elul offers: week after week of days unburdened by any other holidays or special observances that may therefore be given over to thinking carefully about ourselves and our lives and our deeds…and, painful though the process may be, also in identifying our own moral shortcomings, errors of judgment, ethical missteps, and unnecessarily missed opportunities to do good in the world. It is a pleasant experience for almost none, but it can be a productive one.

To assist in making the whole Elul experience as positive as possible, it has been my custom in recent years to recommend to my readers a single book that might prove helpful in framing otherwise amorphous thoughts and regrets in a productive way, in confronting the larger paintings of which the details of our personal lives are the brushstrokes, in setting our personal stories into the larger saga of humankind and its foibles and flaws, and, generally speaking, in coming to terms with the lives we have constructed and owning up to the various ways in which those lives have been characterized more often than not by decisions that, for all they seemed reasonable at the time, feel flawed and inconsistent with the values we claim to hold dear when viewed in the rearview mirror.

Last year, I recommended a remarkable novel that I had just read, Marcos Aguinis’s book Against the Inquisition, which I found both moving, intelligent, and stimulating. (To revisit my thoughts from last Elul, click here.) This year, however, I would like to recommend a book that I first read decades ago, and which wasn’t that new a work even then: Clark Moustakas’s book, Loneliness.

Moustakas’s renown has faded in the years following his death in 2012 at age eighty-nine, but in his day he was one of America’s foremost psychologist/authors and was widely acclaimed specifically as an expert in humanistic and clinical psychology. He published prodigiously throughout his career, but the book I wish to recommend was one of his earlier works that first appeared in 1961. (I read it when I was a student at JTS more than a decade after it first came out.) I would like to introduce it to you in this week’s letter and suggest why I feel it would make an excellent choice for Elul reading.

The book isn’t long at all, a mere 107 pages in the first print edition. Yet the author manages in those few pages to speak almost amazingly deeply and provocatively about the human condition…and in a way that is somehow both reassuring and challenging. I just finished re-reading the book and, even after all these years was struck again by its remarkable profundity. If there is one book you can find the time to read this Elul, Loneliness is the one I recommend you consider. (Nor is this a pricey investment: you can find used copies online for $2 a book.)

I was prompted to re-read the book by an article I noticed the other day on the website of YouGov, the U.K.-based data analysis firm, that determined—not anecdotally, but by using actual data collected this last summer and subsequently analyzed by themselves—that the millennials among us can reasonably be characterized as the loneliest generation ever. (Click here to read the article for yourself.) This came as a huge surprise to me—you would think that people raised in a world in which people are practically defined by social media that offer the possibility of maintaining not dozens or scores but hundreds or even thousands of “friendships” concurrently, you would think such people would constitute the world’s least lonely people ever. And yet, the report seemed unequivocal: 30% of millennials polled reported feeling “always or often” lonely (as opposed to half that many baby boomers such as myself) and more than one in five—22%—of millennials reported that they do not have any friends at all. A different slice of the millennial pie—27% of the total—reported having some friends but no “close” ones. Together, that’s one percentage point short of half of all Americans between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-seven reporting that they either had no friends at all…or at least no close ones. When asked why they find it difficult to make friends with others, a startling 53% responded that the fault was in their own stars—that they personally were too shy to go out there and find people to be friends with. All of this came as a huge surprise to me.

There’s more thought-provoking data on the YouGov site to consider as well, but what interested me most of all was the basic assumption of the essay’s author, Jamie Ballard, that loneliness was a bad thing that healthy people would naturally avoid (and thus a situation in which most would only find themselves accidentally or tragically). Nor was I amazed that she took that approach, which I think is probably what most people actually do think. The phenomenal success of the television series Friends, which ran for ten years starting a quarter-century ago, was probably rooted in that concept as well: the show was a little about romance and a little about life, but it was mostly about friendship—its name basically said as much—and its great success lay in the portrait it offered viewers of young urban types, the sustaining feature of whose lives was precisely the degree to which their friends watched out for them, cared for them, and, yes, loved them even when they were being otherwise disagreeable or snarly.

I think most of us subscribe to the notion that loneliness is a bad thing. And yet Moustakas’s book goes off in the precisely opposite direction, describing self-growth—and specifically the kind that leads to self-awareness and self-confidence—as an edifice almost of necessity built on a foundation of the kind of aloneness that moderns inevitably denigrate as unwanted, unworthy loneliness.

He writes anecdotally, telling us the stories of several of his patients and also telling his own story in a few intensely personal, sustained episodes. But he also writes about famous people and describes the source of their inventiveness, their creativity, their artistry, and their success in life as having been rooted in the deep sense of personal autonomy that begins with the acknowledgement that we are all alone in our lives and then goes on to create the impetus to seek the kind of companionship that, rather than denying or masking that sense of aloneness, celebrates and enhances it to the degree that we find in love the experience of being fully autonomous—and thus fully alone—in the company of a similarly autonomous individual. Among the people about whom he writes, some will be familiar to all—the sections on Abraham Lincoln, Emily Dickinson, and Admiral Richard Byrd are particularly moving—and others, like the French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry or the German adventurer and explorer Hermann Buhl will be less well known. But, taken all together, the portraits he paints are all of individuals who found in loneliness the foundation upon which to build a social, meaningful, intensely productive life guided by principles forged by those individuals themselves in the crucible of their own autonomous selves.

Perhaps I should let the author speak for himself. In the introduction to these portraits I just mentioned, he sets forth his argument in these terms:

Every man is alone. Ultimately, each person exists in isolation. He faces himself in silence, wending his way in individual pathways, seeking companionship, reaching out to others. Forever, man moves forward stretching to the skies, searching the realization of his own capacities. In loneliness, man seeks the fulfillment of his inner nature. He maps new meanings, and perceives new patterns for old ways and habits.  Alone, the life of man passes before him. His philosophy, the meanings he attaches to his work and his relations, each significant aspect of his being comes into view as new values are formed, as man resolves to bring human significance, to bring life to each new day, to each piece of work, to each creation. In loneliness, every experience is alive and vivid and full of meaning. When one has been greatly isolated and restricted in movement, one deeply feels the value of openness, of freedom and expansiveness. Life takes on an exquisite meaning, an exhilarating richness. When one has lived in total darkness, one piercingly appreciates the sunlight, the fireside, the beacon, the beginning dawn. When one is cut off from human companionship, one discovers a deep reverence for friendship, for the one who stands by in the hour of need and shame. In the days of pain and defeat, loneliness takes on a human depth.  When one is sequestered from life, when one is purely alone and dying, when one is lost in a world of dreary emptiness, then color becomes exquisite, rich, desirable, fulfilling. When one has been sharply isolated and lonely, every moment is pure, every sound is delightful, every aspect of the universe takes on a value and meaning, an exquisite beauty. The isolated tree stretches out to meet its new neighbor; the lonely star twinkles and turns to face its emerging companions in the night; the lost child runs to loved ones with open arms.

A mere excerpt or two won’t do justice to the book, which is remarkable both in terms of its brevity and its profundity. I recommend it wholeheartedly to all—both broadly as a very interesting, challenging way to consider the human condition and more narrowly as an Elul book that has in its handful of chapters the capacity to frame the whole experience of entering the Days of Awe almost upon us not as a burden or a test, but as an exercise in deep, sustaining self-awareness and self-knowledge.