L'enfer est les autres: On the virtues of solitude and other people

Chop Suey--Edward Hopper

 Buried in a story in the New Yorker this week, a woman mentions she had emailed a man she had never met, about an issue connected to the use of the Internet,  and he replied at  3AM and either that night or some other they met in a bar, and talked for 5 hours and became "almost best friends."

Which made the Phantom think: Is there anyone he could actually sit down with, in the same place, without becoming terminally squirmy, and simply talk for five hours and not get bored, disappointed, and want to leave after one or two hours?

In his whole life?

Maybe, when he was younger and the person in question was a woman with whom he had not yet slept, and the conversation, which may have ranged over a wide variety of topics, still was, on some level, about whether or not they would go to bed.

But what about just talking ?

A college roommate, who the Phantom never talked to after college, would spend at least 5 hours every night in the lounge of the Humanities Reading Room, a space separated by a glass wall from the reading room, and in the lounge, in the mid 1960's you could smoke and take a "study break." 

But for the roommate it was always break, never study. He talked about Sartre and Camus, in whatever language he felt like that night--he was fluent in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese and he seemed able to pick up new languages talking to the cabbie on the way in from the airport.  He never seemed to actually study. The Phantom felt superior to this slacker, who only talked, but of course that was then. 

Now, the Phantom thinks, what a remarkable person--he was unfailingly kind to the Phantom, whom he very rarely saw because the Phantom was always at the library, and they would  nod to each other, when the Phantom came down from the stacks to use the bathroom in the lounge. 

One of the women this roommate talked to was an intimidatingly brilliant and quite exotically beautiful young lady--Japanese father/ Austrian mother--and this coed, hearing the roommate's description of the Phantom as someone who never talked to anyone, just studied, expressed an interest in going on a date with the Phantom.

When the Phantom got home that night, he knew something was very up. His roommate often sat around the room with a few friends, smoking, talking about Andre Gide or whomever, but when the Phantom got home at eleven, the friends knew to clear out, and the roommate joined them in someone else's room. The Phantom needed to be in bed by eleven-thirty, so he could be at the library the next morning, when it opened.

But this night, nobody moved. "Eva wants to go out with you," the roommate said, in very pregnant tones.  He explained that every red blooded male on campus would give his right arm to have a date with Eva and now the Phantom had this golden opportunity and nobody was leaving the room until the Phantom placed the call. The Phantom saw this could be a prolonged debated and he calculated he could ask her out and bail out later, so he walked down the hall to the pay phone at the other end, flanked by his guard and placed the call. Fine, I've got the date, now get out of my room.

As it turned out, for a variety of reasons, the Phantom did go on the date--he was a junior in college and had never gone on a college date, although he had had girlfriends in high school.  He talked to Eva for at least five hours, at a play, afterwards on the patio of the dorm, but he could not get as much out of her as he wanted. She kept deflecting the questions back to him and he had the distinct impression she learned much more about him that night than he did about her. 

This may have been partly because, early on, when she asked him about his hermit life and why he hadn't dated in college, he replied, honestly, he was not at college to have a good time. He was at college to get past college and into medical school. A girlfriend, any friend, would be a distraction and require time. There would be time for people, later. 

She gave him an appraising look and said, "Well, that sounds like a plan."

As it turned out, that one date did more for the Phantom's academic success than any single event in his college career, ironically enough. The one time he carved out to not be studying on a Saturday night, and it bought him more academically. During the intermission at the play, the Phantom, with his Asian looking date, ran into his organic chemistry lab instructor, a Nigerian, black as night, who was there with his girlfriend, a Swedish blond, another grad student, who would be the Phantom's organic chem lab instructor the next semester. So, there we were, all chatting amiably, the only racially mixed couples at the Trinity Theater in Providence, Rhode Island that night. Thereafter, the Phantom never got less than a 95 on any organic chemistry lab.

The Phantom could never be sure, but he thought Eva probably had something to do with his election into Phi Beta Kappa--Eva had been, of course, elected as one of the very few juniors into that honorary society.  

The Phantom never saw Eva after that night, not even in the library. He heard she had a boyfriend, a poet, by her senior year. 

Friends 

The Phantom was right about one thing that night--there would be  time for people later. In medical school, in New York City, the Phantom had friends and time to enjoy them, sitting around on call rooms, in the Emergency Room, on the wards, talking. 

But talking for five hours, to one person?  One hour, maybe.

When the Phantom met his wife, they talked and talked.  Friends said they were "chatty." But it was more than chatty. She had opinions, and judgments which the Phantom thought were forcefully put and well defended.  There have been a few other people--his brother and his brother's wife--but, for the most part, the Phantom has not met many people who were worth more than a hour.

Every Thanksgiving, the Phantom hikes up Mount Major with his sons, and they talk the whole way up and back, but that is not like sitting across from someone for three hours, in one place.

The Phantom's wife dragged him off to Italy once--under protest. But there in the piazzas, the Phantom saw Italians sitting around outdoor tables over small cups of coffee and tiny pastries, just talking. Those Italians talked for hours, into the night. (When they worked remains a mystery.) And, of course, the Phantom could not understand what they were saying, but they seemed absorbed, not angry, not agitated, just interested in what they were talking about.   

Connect and Die

In college, the Phantom felt vaguely superior to students who seemed afraid to be alone, who seemed to need contact with other people. The Phantom was secure in his solitude and read Walden and other accounts of solitary life. 

In Lady Chatterly's Lover,  Lady Chatterly spies Mellors, the game keeper, washing up outside his cabin. She watches him, fascinated, from the woods, entranced by a man who lives alone and who seems fine with that.  Her world is one of too much company--her husband, who depends on her, his friends, her friends, her family. She never has time for herself.  But this man, living alone in the woods on her husband's estate, has quite a lot of time for himself. And she envies him that, and she respects his independence. 

In "Huis Clos," Sartre's play about three people locked in a room for all eternity, they come to understand, "Hell is other people."  Of course, Sartre did not mean it that simply--he was talking about the angst of seeing yourself through the eyes of other people, a process of depersonalization.  But the point holds--either way you think of it.

And that is the human condition:  Women (or men or simply other people)--can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em.