TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I need a lot of alone time. I know this about myself, and I’ve done my best to build a life that protects that need. Yes, I’m a solo parent of two children, so I’m not alone much in the evenings. Yes, I’ve lived in the same city all my life, so it’s not easy for me to be alone in public—to sit at a coffee shop to do some writing, or to have a meal or see a concert by myself. I’m always running into people I know: High school classmates, former college professors, former students, old neighbors, and even relatives.

But I work from home each day, so I’ve given myself a buffer of several hours every day when I’m mostly by myself. Sometimes there are meetings, in person or virtual, but for the most part while my children are at school, I get a decent stretch of solo time. I remember, when I left my day job almost 15 years ago to work from home as a freelancer, a coworker said, “Aren’t you going to get lonely?” I laughed. “No offense, but no.” Anyone who thought I’d be lonely didn’t know me very well.

I get it, though: it’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, many of us crave and require solitude to write, to read, to concentrate. But sometimes prolonged “apartness” from others can make you feel a little feral. So many of us got a taste of this during lockdown in 2020! Parents, children, coworkers, neighbors: I think we all had to learn how to live in our bubbles, separated from many of the people and places we loved, and then we had to relearn how to enter the world once lockdown was over.  There is such a thing as too much solitude; too much separation from others. All things in moderation, I suppose.

Today’s poem is by one of my favorite poets, the late Stanley Plumly. Maybe more than anyone else in my life, Stan understood the double bind of deep solitude: that for the poet, for the artist, it’s as lonely as it is necessary. It’s both.

At Night
by Stanley Plumly

When did I know that I’d have to carry it around
         in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket,

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
         added to, handful by handful if necessary, until 

the way my mother would sit all night in a room 
         without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

Where would she go, because I would go there.
         In the morning, nothing but a blanket and all her

absence and the feeling in the air of happiness.
         And so much loneliness, a kind of purity of being

and emptiness, no one you are or could ever be,
          my mother like another me in another life, gone

where I will go, night now likely dark enough
         I can be alone as I’ve never been alone before.

“At Night” by Stanley Plumly from MIDDLE DISTANCE © 2020 Estate of Stanley Plumly. Used with the permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.