The limit on the mountain
On self-reliance, the solitude of an emergency, and the difference between being alone and being enough
Photo by Charlotte Fosdike on Unsplash
There is a kind of solitude you choose, and I have written about it before — the room, the closed door, the good hour the world is asked, politely, to wait for. You go in on purpose. You come back up with something. This essay is not about that kind. It is about the other kind, the kind nobody chooses, that arrives without asking and finds you unequal to it.
We were high on a mountain, the two of us, a long way up and a long way from anywhere. I will not say which mountain. It had been an ordinary day of walking — the good tiredness in the legs, the light going long across the tops — and then it was not an ordinary day at all. My friend became unwell. It happened quickly, the way these things apparently happen, wrongly and all at once, and within a few minutes the person I had been talking to was unconscious on the ground.
I knelt over them. I said their name. I did the small useless things the body does when it has run ahead of its knowledge — I checked for breath, I tried to rouse them, I looked up and around for anyone at all. There was no phone signal. There was no other walker on the path, no farmhouse, no moving speck on any slope the eye could reach. I was, in the plainest sense of the word, alone. And so, in a different and far more frightening sense, was the person lying in front of me.
I have grown up, like most people raised on the English-speaking side of things, on a quiet gospel of self-reliance without ever having to name it. Emerson wrote the hymn to it in 18411. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. It is a magnificent essay and I have loved it for most of my life — the sufficiency of the single self, the refusal to live after the world’s opinion, the man who “in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” That last line is the one I would have said I believed. Independence carried intact through any company. The self as a thing that is, at bottom, enough.
On the mountain I found its floor.
Because the urge to help was total, and it was overpowered — completely, humiliatingly — by the depth of my own ignorance. I did not know what was wrong. I did not know what to do. Wanting to save someone and being able to save someone are two different countries, and I stood at that moment on the wrong side of the border with no way across. This is a species of solitude I had not catalogued before. Not the well you lower a bucket into and haul something up from. Not solitude as discipline, or vocation, or the difficult good Rilke meant2. This was solitude as insufficiency — the condition of being the only one there and knowing, with total clarity, that you are not enough.
And then the thing I keep turning over. My friend came back — not by my hand, not through any competence of mine, but on their own. Consciousness returned the way weather returns over a ridge, and with it, slowly, speech. And the first thing they did, still grey, still barely there, was to direct their own rescue: to tell me where the medicine was, and what it was, and what I should do with it. The most self-reliant act I witnessed on that mountain was performed by the person who had just been unconscious on the grass.
Except that it was not self-reliance at all, and this is the whole of what I brought back down. It was two people, each supplying exactly what the other lacked. Their knowledge and my hands. My presence and their instructions. Neither of us, alone, was equal to that afternoon. Together, and only together, we were. Emerson’s iron string is real — I do not want to sound as though the mountain taught me to distrust myself. But it taught me that the string is strung between two posts, and that a self held up as a closed and sufficient system is a myth the flat ground lets you believe and the high ground takes away.
If I reach for one word for it, I reach — as I do when I’m stuck — for Heidegger, and for being-with: the idea that we are never first alone and then, secondarily, joined to others, but are woven in with them from the start, so deeply that we mostly forget it3. The emergency did not create the bond between us. It disclosed one that the daily fiction of self-sufficiency had let me mislay. I had thought I was a man who could look after himself on a hill. What I actually was, it turned out, was one half of the only unit that could get us both down.
And down we went. Slowly, very slowly, testing each step, one of us watching the other for the smallest sign of the thing coming back. It took a long time. The light I had admired earlier went out of the tops while we were still on them.
Down in the valley, with my friend recovered enough to sit and drink something warm, we were able to talk about what had happened — to lay it out between us and turn it over, the way you can only do once the danger has become a story. Time went on passing, and both of us were still in it. That is the sentence I keep. Both of us, still in it. The room upstairs I go into to work, I go into on purpose and I come out of when the hour is done; that solitude is a door I open and close. This other solitude did not knock. It came for me, and what it showed me, before it dissolved, was its own dissolution — that the self runs out, that there is a floor under self-reliance, and that finding it is not a failure of the self but the plain shape of a life lived among the people who happen, on the day it matters, to be standing next to you.
I opened the door on the mountain the way you open any door: by discovering, hard, that there was one. Then I went back out into the rest of it — down into the valley, into the warm room, into the conversation — where the rest of it, as it turns out, is other people.
Sources
Ralph Waldo Emerson — Self-Reliance (in Essays: First Series, 1841). “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” And: “the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Rainer Maria Rilke — Letters to a Young Poet, on solitude as a difficult good (referenced, not quoted here; see the fuller treatment in The room she painted her way back to).
Martin Heidegger — Being and Time (1927), on Mitsein (being-with) as a basic structure of existence rather than a later addition to a solitary self.