On Solitude

And transformation

Two ducks, together but separate.

Paul went off last weekend to look for whooping cranes in Wisconsin, and left me all alone.

I love to be alone. 

Alone I can lounge in bed, read, write, and stare at the phone. I can wander the house, fold the laundry, and talk to the cats. I can snack, stretch, and daydream, go to dinner with friends, throw lumpy pottery, and shop online for secondhand British workwear.

It was a nice weekend, in other words. But, in truth, he doesn’t need to be gone for any of these things to happen. When we got together we were both pretty set in our ways and while the past ten months of cancer and cohabitation have definitely required adjustment, one thing they have not required is constant companionship.

For our wedding we wrote our own vows, and central to them was this quote from Rilke, well-trod in vow-writing circles, but resonant all the same.

“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”

Standing there in a Wisconsin park, in full view of if not exactly audible to our family and friends, we vowed to serve as the guardians of each other’s solitude – to honor our individual autonomy, give each other grace, and some g-d space.

Imagine my surprise then, catching up on back issues of the New Yorker on the flight to AWP last month, to come across this quote in the middle of Rachel Aviv’s profile of University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard – and to find it dismissed as “silly.”

“It feels like a way of reassuring yourself that some of the flaws in the relationship are actually really beautiful,” said Callard to Aviv, adding that she found “the idea that a marriage should hold space for each person’s incommunicable core” to be pessimistic – an admission of defeat in the face of the marriage project.

Well. 

It is perhaps normal to question one's decisions should one find them dismissed with such certitude in the pages of the New Yorker – and I did, for a bit, wonder if I had gotten it all wrong. Aviv’s profile is an in-depth look at Callard’s marriage to Arnold Brooks, a former grad student seven years her junior for whom Callard had left her husband – Ben Callard, another U of C professor – just three weeks after his declaration of love. The three of them now live together and share the work of raising three children – but this unorthodox arrangement isn’t really the thrust of the thing. Rather, Aviv is interested in Callard’s ongoing investigation of the nature of love and marriage, which has become the focus of her philosophical work.

Or maybe that’s just what I was interested in. To Callard, per Aviv, a committed romantic partnership should be a shared project, in which both (or more, I guess) parties long to love and be loved because they are unhappy with who they are on their own. Together, runs the thread, they can engage in a shared effort to be better, do better, love better. 

Said Callard, by way of explication: “One of the things I said very early on to my beloved was this: ‘I could completely change now,’ … Radical change, becoming a wholly other person, is not out of the question. There is suddenly [with a new relationship] room for massive aspiration.”

This is presented in the piece as the Socratic model of love, at odds with her new husband’s Aristotelian take on things, in which “happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.” Or, as he’s quoted earlier up in the story: “Aspiration can’t be infinite, as much as you would love it to be, because at some point you have to get to the value that you are supposed to be aspiring towards. And, once you’re there, that’s who you are.”

Sitting on the plane, reading through all of this, and wondering if I was pessimistic for loving that Rilke bit so much and if I should be sort of publicly embarrassed about it, I realized, nah.

It’s been 33 years since I got that undergraduate philosophy degree, but in this conflict I am on the side of Aristotle and Arnold. While new love presents a novel prism by which to see and be seen, one that can’t help but shape your self-conception, I don’t believe it is of a higher philosophical order to have that love be the engine that drives you to constantly strive for self-improvement.

Until the past few years I don’t think I actually, consciously understood myself to be self-sufficient, I just was – as much an unspoken condition as water to a fish. Getting married for the first time at 54, and not having much of a track record for long-term relationships up until then, means that I’ve had 33 years of adulthood to figure out who I am. It was ugly at times – I’ve blocked out most of my 30s – but I was self-sufficient when I met Paul, and I was happy, in general. Now, I am happier still, in large part because all the evolving, refining, growing, and building I have done up to now was in service of getting to this place, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

When we got married we also promised not to try and fix one another, because we are not broken, we are whole and complete as we are. We are not perfect but we are enough – like the Finns are, in this New York Times article, or like Sarah Miller’s ugly bathroom. 

I have been conflating “aloneness” and “self-sufficiency” with Rilke’s solitude here, and that’s probably not fair, because I know that what’s at issue is not the ability to go on vacation without one’s romantic partner (something some people apparently find startling). What’s in question is whether two people in honest romantic partnership can exist, as the great Phil Christman puts it, “inside a pair of parentheses” while still each maintaining their own unique unknowable emotional core. I think that they can, and that acceptance of the limits of intimacy can be just as profound and generative as Callard’s more (frankly) exhausting model.

What remains interesting to me about this essay is the idea of transformation. Because, it is undeniable that in the ten months since I got married I have been transformed, by cancer and by choice. Where I once had long blonde hair, I now have a grey crew cut, and a weird chemo curl. I have smaller breasts, crisscrossed with scars. I have less muscle tone, more fatigue, and a whole lot of post-traumatic stress. I am quieter in some ways, but louder in others, and less patient with fools (unless they may be holy). And I have this large man living in my apartment, puttering around upstairs and listening to audio recordings of loons. Where once I was one, in community with friends, family, and the world, now I am still all of that, but in closest community with this wondrous other being, and that has changed me too.

That I was diagnosed with cancer ten days before we were married will forever be a foundational part of this story of love and transformation, and I’m only just beginning to try and untangle how each has impacted the other, the illness and the marriage. It’s something I hope to write more about in the coming months, but in the meantime I’ll just leave you with a bit more wisdom from Phil, whose essay “How to be Married” (from the brilliant How to be Normal) we also read while crafting our vows, but which is so seamlessly written as to be almost unquotable, save perhaps for this: 

“When Ashley and I returned to each other, when, today, we return to each other in small ways every day, it’s as though each of us has been living both the close, sordid lives of our own self-consciousness and a larger, more expansive life that we don’t know about, that we need the other person to generate. … I see the more than there is in her that is in her. As she sees the more in me than there is in me that is in me. We will help each other remember it, until the error that is time is corrected and all those flickers stay in place.”

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I didn’t send out a newsletter last week because I was busy writing something for publication elsewhere, for actual money. My analysis of Chicago’s tense mayoral election went up Thursday at the Baffler – many thanks to all who have already read it and said nice things! It’s been a long time since I’ve written about anything besides breast cancer, and it felt pretty good. Maybe I’ll do it again sometime.

Meanwhile, speaking of money, paying subscribers can look forward to an interview with writer, teacher, tarot reader, and fellow Substacker Cameron Steele next week, just as soon as I have a chance to sit down and edit the transcription of our wonderful hourlong conversation. Topics covered include: friends with cancer, the post-treatment blues, illness narratives in general, and our shared obsession with Anne Boyer’s The Undying in particular. It’s a good one.

Last: longtime readers may thrill to the news that OUR BACKYARD DUCKS HAVE RETURNED. Stay tuned for an embarrassing amount of duck-related content in the months to come. Duckling Watch 2023 begins now!