Isolation
Today is my son’s 8th birthday, so to celebrate we’re having three of his friends over for a sleepover. All night the boys have been jumping into and out of a wading pool, eating pizza, staging mock gun battles with plastic pistols, playing “Halo” on the xBox, and generally creating havoc. I told my wife that this was precisely the sort of birthday party I yearned for all of my boyhood.
I grew up in the Pine Barrens of Southern New Jersey, an isolated and protected area of deep woods. Sometimes actually in the Pinelands, in and around the cabin built by my grandfather, surrounded by trails and streams, and sometimes what we’ll call Pinelands-adjacent, at my parents’ house, with a highway in front and deep woods in the back. But in neither circumstance where there many people around, and certainly few people my own age. So I read an awful lot of books and comic books.
In my adulthood, I have lots of friends. In retrospect, this was a life ambition: Get out of the Pine Barrens, and get some friends. Now I’ve got them, and they’re good ones. I intend to keep them. But because of my upbringing, I still need lots of time to myself. Example: I said good night to my wife an hour and a half ago. (She’s still downstairs keeping an eye on those boys.) What am I doing? I’m upstairs writing this and other things. Sometimes I need to be by myself for days. Oftentimes, I’ve driven hours away, and rented a motel room in the desert, or on a near-deserted stretch of the coastline, so that I can spend days alone by myself, writing and smoking cigars and eating my prepacked food and drinking and thinking.
In other words, isolation still calls to me.
But only in moderation. Only for brief stints. Then I need re-immersion into society. But what would it be like to stay isolated? To stay as isolated as, say, the most isolated man on the planet, a man with 31 square miles all to himself in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon? Read this story and then imagine what it must feel like to be the last person in your world.
August 22nd, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Some times isolation is good. With my job in a casino and dealing with people, both employees and customers, it’s good to get away. A few times I had it with people so much that I’ve turned off my cell phone, took my house phone off the hook, and did not turn on my computer. It felt good to be unplugged.
August 24th, 2010 at 6:11 am
And isn’t this why, in part, you are a playwright? Isolation followed by the collaborative and social nature of making theatre.
August 24th, 2010 at 10:25 pm
Werner, I have wondered that myself at times. Because yes, I still need to balance social interaction with willed isolation; too much of either isn’t good. On the other hand, my sister grew up in the same environment and isn’t a playwright — she’s a secretary for Galloway Township Public Schools. So who knows?
August 25th, 2010 at 1:47 pm
Well certainly this ying/yang, isolation/social time, doesn’t make you a playwright. You did that yourself, for sure. But perhaps it’s the reason you didn’t just write novels, which seems just isolation followed by a book tour, which is actually probably more isolation, at least in these tough days for novels.
August 25th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
On that basis, I think you are correct. When I was an adolescent, I tried writing several novels. In retrospect, that may have been because I didn’t actually know anyone to work creatively with yet; the moment I started to meet those people, I started writing and directing (and occasionally acting in) plays. I know many novelists and I can’t understand them at all. For one thing, they write in the early morning. For another thing, there doesn’t seem to be an act break where they go outside and smoke.
August 25th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
Maybe you’re the one to break the mold. You’ve often been a risk-taker. Maybe you should go for it all & be the next Steinbeck-after-dark. Oh, and novels do have acts; they’re called chapters!