It’s a condition that afflicts many people. Some aren’t even aware that they suffer from it.

It’s the felt need for otherness, for a defense against the lure of solipsism.

I’ve suffered from it for years. That’s partly why I taught school. I was raising students to the level where we could talk without either one of us talking down.

My students would tell me, face to face or in letters, how they needed to talk to someone who wasn’t satisfied with the lower levels of life just going through the motions.

It seems always difficult to find one or more in mental/verbal repartee who won’t leave you holding both swords, fencing with yourself.

I’ve had friends who wanted to push the envelope. I think of one who wanted to talk religion. We were at a party and he pulled me aside. He was a minister and maybe wanted converts. Or he was fresh from the seminary or from the theology classes where you debate the issues before you’re certified or ordained. He was eager. I warned him. Once you get me started, watch out!

Heedless, he jumped into the arena, like signing a pre-nuptial agreement before consummation.

It only took a few hours. He’d been to college, so he knew the ropes. By evening’s end, he had lost his faith.

I had tried to warn him. He was left struggling to hold on to agnosticism, but religion itself was gone, the faith drained out of him.

The next day we were his guests at the church where he preached. He drew me aside before the sermon and apologized, said he had to choose which to betray, me or the church, and the steady job won out. He tried to make it up to me by referring in the sermon to Jane Fonda and her heroic efforts touring the world to bring the notions of peace and détente, (you can see how long ago this was), how she would be welcome in any church in America, and older men in the congregation muttered loud enough to be heard, “Not in this church, she wouldn’t!”

And I kept it to myself, the knowing that, like a hunger unfulfilled, he’s not the one to spar with.

But I was lucky and happy, deliriously happy, that I had found and chosen the lovely brilliant woman who had chosen me, that we satisfied each other as we talked together about anything and everything, our lives interpenetrated as we grew large together. I needed no one else and nothing more.

Sixty years. And now that she is gone and I’m alone, I need to learn to fill the need for otherness. I know it won’t be quite the same. I miss her every day.

I’m learning, still learning as I used to teach others, now to teach myself, to learn the ways of compromise, to make what is, enough.

I’m blessed again. My beloved Daughter, and her husband, now my son or better yet my friend, close friend, know the need to find ways to counteract that same intellectual loneliness that can strike us down, but they have each other, and now they have me, and I have them. And they have lives and thoughts and knowledge that I’ll never know, ahead of me in so many ways, a source of richness. A diminishment can open out in other directions. They’re quicker than I am. They’re enough to keep me going to the end.

And they’ve given me a blog so I can teach again and share, reach through the loneliness that doesn’t now immobilize me. I don’t need to simply limit myself to authors living or remote whose minds can interact with mine. I’m living in the real and present world.

I miss my wife. I love her every day. For as long as I live. I carry that love into the open wider world, to share the ways to transcend that intellectual loneliness, to teach by example, to live in the enriched moment, to joy as long as there is life.

The tears are there, but I’m smiling. Love supersedes thought. I need never feel alone.