Just because something is missing, does that mean it should be there -or would be there under normal circumstances? Suppose someone does not realize it’s missing and has no thoughts about it. Under those circumstances, is it really missing -or does that description apply only when it’s noticed? Is the evidence of absence the same as the absence of evidence?

I have to say, this all reminds me of the philosopher Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy that attempts to suggest that the burden of proof lies upon the person who is making unfalsifiable claims, rather than shifting the burden of disproof to others. ‘He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.’(Wikipedia)

Loneliness is something like that: a social expectation that in the absence of people, one should feel lonely. Value judgements are seldom provable, and yet it sits there like a normally hidden blemish under a shirt, just waiting for a morning mirror.

Perhaps it is important here to distinguish between solitude and loneliness, and an essay by the writer and historian Fay Bound Alberti in the online publication Aeon helped to delineate the boundaries: https://aeon.co/ideas/one-is-the-loneliest-number-the-history-of-a-western-problem

‘The term ‘loneliness’ first crops up in English around 1800. Before then, the closest word was ‘oneliness’, simply the state of being alone. As with solitude – from the Latin ‘solus’ which meant ‘alone’ – ‘oneliness’ was not coloured by any suggestion of emotional lack. Solitude or oneliness was not unhealthy or undesirable, but rather a necessary space for reflection… Skip forward a century or two, however, and the use of ‘loneliness’ [is] burdened with associations of emptiness and the absence of social connection.’

‘The contemporary notion of loneliness stems from cultural and economic transformations that have taken place in the modern West. Industrialisation, the growth of the consumer economy, the declining influence of religion and the popularity of evolutionary biology all served to emphasise that the individual was what mattered – not traditional, paternalistic visions of a society in which everyone had a place.’ But there has also arisen a social stigma associated with being lonely. ‘While loneliness can create empathy, lonely people have also been subjects of contempt; those with strong social networks often avoid the lonely. It is almost as though loneliness were contagious.’

And indeed, it has long been recognized that belonging to a community seems to be associated with mental as well as physical health. So ‘loneliness can exist only in a world where the individual is conceived as separate from, rather than part of, the social fabric.’ Only in a society, perhaps, where individual efforts are recognized as contributions, not anomalies. A bit of a mixed bag, isn’t it: damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I like to think that I am selectively ‘onely’ -that there is a choice. But as I get older, and wear my years less confidently than my clothes, I find that the options are sometimes rescinded. People -strangers, often women- smile at me when I am sitting alone. And while I have always enjoyed a smile, lately I have come to see it as a harbinger of something else. Something more than just holding a door open for an older man: I hesitate to call it pity, so perhaps I’ll suggest that it is transference -in an almost-psychoanalytic sense. I don’t really think I look that fatherly, but perhaps sitting alone at a table in a restaurant, I evoke not entirely buried feelings of guilt for the infrequent visits to parents. Or is it a premonitory dread of my own anticipated fate?

I was coming back from a visit to some friends a while back, and decided to stop in a little town for some coffee and a snack. I suppose the place was too small for a Tim Horton’s or even a MacDonald’s outlet, so I opted for a generic version on the only main street. It wasn’t at all busy, and there seemed to be a wealth of tables available, so I chose one in the window overlooking the mildly busy street.

For some reason, a woman walking past on the sidewalk outside suddenly caught my eye and smiled at me. Short grey hair, with a dark red ankle-length coat, she seemed not unlike any of the others who had strolled past unaware of me on the other side of the glass, so I promptly forgot about her until I saw her standing beside my table with a coffee in her hand.

“You must be a stranger in town,” she said, not unkindly.

I smiled as an answer, hoping she was just on her way to another table.

She shook her head slowly, as if trying to decide what to do. “You look so much like my father,” she added. “I thought maybe he had decided to come out for a coffee again…”

“Come out?” I said, wondering if that was a good thing or not.

Her smile broadened. “I had to put Dad in a care home last year because he kept wandering off.” She performed a quiet sigh and sat down in the other seat at my table. “He still walks out occasionally. The staff say he gets lonely and decides to go looking for me.”

I nodded sympathetically. “There must be lots of other people there, though. Don’t they help with the loneliness?” I suddenly realized that sounded terribly naïve.

But she nodded politely. “With Alzheimer’s you can be lonely in a crowd, they tell me.” She stared at me for a moment and then had a sip of her coffee. “Apparently it can be more than just frightening for them,“ she added, glancing at me again. “It makes me wonder what it is about being alone that terrifies them -or the rest of us, for that matter.”

I shrugged. “Being alone isn’t always a bad thing,” I said, sitting back in my seat. “Sometimes it can be a choice.”

Her expression shifted just a little, and I could see she was examining my eyes. “Or sometimes what starts off as a choice turns into a sentence, don’t you think…?”

She smiled enigmatically, and after we engaged in a bit more small talk, she apologized for bothering me and then walked slowly over to another table filled with friends.

I don’t know whether she’d been proselytizing or just being kind, but I kind of envied her, you know…