These ways of thinking about loneliness—social, therapeutic, moral, existential—make two assumptions that I cannot accept. First, each says that loneliness equates with literal aloneness and consequently is remediable by some sort of human action, such as repenting for sins, therapeutic relating, building the project of your life with your own heroic hands. Second, each assumes that loneliness is fundamentally unpleasant.
But if there is an archetypal sense of loneliness accompanying us from the beginning, then to be alive is also to feel lonely. Loneliness comes and goes apart from the measures we take. It does not depend on being literally alone, for pangs of loneliness can strike in the midst of friends, in bed with a lover, at the microphone before a cheering crowd. When feelings of loneliness are seen as archetypal, they become necessary; they are no longer harbingers of sin, of dread, or of wrong. We can accept the strange autonomy of the feeling and free loneliness from identification with literal isolation. Nor is loneliness mainly unpleasant once it receives its archetypal background.
When we look—or, rather, feel—closely into the sense of loneliness we find it is composed of several elements: nostalgia, sadness, silence, and a yearning imagination for “something else” not here, not now. For these elements and images to show, we first have to focus on them rather than on remedies for being left literally alone. Desperation grows worse when we seek ways out of despair.
— The Soul’s Code, Ch 2, Growing Down