It’s good to be alone. It’s good to shut the door behind one and not be with other people for a while. It hasn’t always been like this. In childhood being alone was a defect or a failing, often painful. If you were alone it was because no one wanted to be with you or because there was no one to be with. The absence of others was unequivocally negative. Several people together was good, alone was bad, that was the rule. And yet I never asked myself how this applied to my father, who spent so much time alone. He was a supreme being, everything about him was as it should be, it never occurred to me that his solitude too could be a defect or a flaw, something painful. He had no friends, only colleagues, and he spent most evenings alone in the basement recreation room, where he listened to music or worked on his stamp collection. He shunned social intimacy, he never sat on a bus, never cut his hair at a hairdresser’s, he was never one of the parents who drove to football matches with a carload of kids. At the time I didn’t notice this. Not until he died and we found his diary was I able to see his life in that light. Loneliness concerned him, he had thought about it a great deal. ‘I have always been able to recognise the lonely,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘They don’t walk the same way as other people. It is as if they don’t carry any joy, any spark within themselves, whether they are women or men.’ In another entry he wrote, ‘I am looking for a word for the opposite of loneliness. I would like to find a different word to love, which is far too overworked and inadequate. Tenderness, peace of mind and soul, togetherness?’ Togetherness was a good word for it. It is the opposite of loneliness. Why he never felt it I don’t know. It is one of the good feelings in life, perhaps the best. And yet I often do as he did, close the door behind me to be alone. I know why I do it, it’s good to be alone, for a few hours to be exempt from all the complicated bonds, all the conflicts, great and small, all the demands and expectations, wills and desires that build up between people, and which after only a short time become so densely intertwined that the room for reflection and for action are both restricted. If everything that stirs between people made a sound, it would be like a chorus, a great murmur of voices would rise from even the faintest glimmer in the eyes. Surely he too must have felt this? Perhaps more powerfully than I do? For he started drinking, and drinking muffles this chorus and makes it possible to be with other people without hearing it. Yes, that must be it. For the sentence he ended that diary entry with, I could never have written. He wrote, ‘In brief, what I have just now so clumsily tried to express is that I have always been a lonely man.’ Or, the thought strikes me now with horror, maybe it was the other way round? Maybe he simply didn’t hear this chorus, didn’t know it existed and therefore didn’t become bound by it, but remained forever standing on the outside, observing how all the others were bound by something he didn’t understand?