Alone at Last: Rose Macaulay’s Ode to the Joys of Solitude

In this life, there are companions that simply feel easy to be with. There’s no such thing as feeling crowded out and both or all parties feel as though they are being fully understood on a deeper level. These relationships are both rare and precious. All other company, though each cherished, tend to reach a point where the interaction begins to feel suffocating.

If you’re an introvert, then you understand entirely how quickly this feeling can come about, and you understand more than anyone that what you need is sweet seclusion. While some may think this is lonely behavior, Rose Macaulay was able to put into words just how charming and comforting it can feel to be left alone in a piece from Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life.

A Rose By Any Other Name

Rose Macaulay published twenty-two books in the span of just twenty years, as well as a number of essays, poems, and newspaper columns. She also gave talks, attended events, threw parties, and was no stranger to public radio offering her commentary on the state of the world. During WWI she worked as a nurse and civil servant and during WWII she became a volunteer ambulance driver at the age of 60, inspired by the likes of Marie Curie.

Her favorite book was the Oxford English Dictionary and she often wrote to the editors with suggestions, improvements, and even corrections, and despite her home being demolished in the Blitz, once rebuilt, she continued to host soirees for friends and acquaintances. The point is that Rose Macaulay was far from a hermit, and would even be considered quite social by most standards, but underneath it all, she was an introvert to the core. This was made exceedingly clear in an essay titled, “Departure of Visitors” which chronicles the pleasure(s) of being at last left alone.

Departure of Visitors

“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.”

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave.

What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being.”

Acknowledgments

If you tend to be more of an introvert, it’s safe to say at this point Rose Macaulay has probably taken the words right out of your mouth, but in another essay, she articulates a similar response readers tend to have once they’ve turned to that very last page in a book, the moment a readers mind becomes uncrowded once again:

“Leisure spreads before my dazzled eyes, a halcyon sea, too soon to be cumbered with the flotsam and jetsam of purposes long neglected, which will, I know it, drift quickly into view again once I am embarked upon that treacherous, enticing ocean. Leisure now is but a brief business, and past return are the days when it seemed to stretch, blue and unencumbered, between one occupation and the next. There are always arrears, always things undone, doubtless never to be done, putting up teasing, reproachful heads, so that, although I slug, I slug among the wretched souls whom care doth seek to kill. But now, just emerged as I am from the tangled and laborious thicket which has so long embosked me, I will contemplate a sweet and unencumbered slugging, a leisure and a liberty as of lotus eaters or gods.”

So the next time you feel your social battery draining and you find yourself longing for the exquisite peace of being alone at long last, you can always revisit the personal pleasure we all share by word thanks to Rose Macaulay, the unsung heroine of the introverted.