Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [61]
Being With People, Being Without 129
The Art of Living
Being with People, Being Without
We’re all torn between the desire for privacy and the fear of loneliness. We all want to be part of the crowd one minute and by ourselves the
next.
I have wended my hot, weary way back from a crowded convention
to the cool, peaceful quiet of my woodworking shop set in the woods
one hundred feet from our vacation home.
Today it is unlikely that I will see anyone at all between breakfast and
late afternoon, when I shake the sawdust out of my hair and go down to
the house for a cool drink and the evening news.
A week ago, I couldn’t wait to get to where the action was. Yesterday,
I went to considerable trouble and some expense to move my airline
reservation up by just two hours.
A week ago, I anticipated the warmth of friendship; yesterday, I
yearned for the chilly silence of solitude. At the convention, I had enjoyed a thousand handshakes, a thousand snippets of conversation on
several dozen social occasions, but now I wish to be alone with myself,
perhaps to finish in my mind those conversations; perhaps to put them
out of my mind completely. The great virtue of being alone is that your
mind can go its own way. It isn’t forced to think along the lines of a
conversation you didn’t start and the contents of which are of no interest to you.
It is amazing how the same brain that juggles words and ideas while
fencing with friends in a crowded room can turn its power to figuring
the angle of a cut in a piece of cherry wood that will make the sidepiece
of a drawer fit precisely into the dovetailed front.
The conversion from convention reporter and part-time well-known
person didn’t take long once I got into my old khaki pants. These hands
with which I hit the keys already have bits of wood chips stuck to the hairs on the back of them. I shook out my shirt before I sat down at my typewriter because I didn’t want to get sawdust down in the cracks between the keys. But I am alone now, and after that hectic week, I trea
sure these moments of blessed anonymity.
I love being alone. I don’t feel the need for anyone. I know it won’t
last, though. Dangle an event in Los Angeles, in Florida or in Seattle in
my face again next week, next month or next year and I’ll endure the
standing in lines, the crowded transportation, the inconvenience, noise
and bustle to get there.
There doesn’t seem to be any happy medium between too many
people in our lives and too few. We look forward to our children coming
home for a visit. They come with children of their own and it soon gets
to be a crowd rubbing against itself until there’s the irritation generated
by friction. They’re ready to go; we’re ready for them to leave. I admire people who don’t feel the need to see friends on Saturday
night or even to mingle with the crowd in the line at the local movie. I
associate the desire for privacy with intellect. The people I know who
genuinely don’t want to go to a party are my smartest friends. We are
naturally gregarious creatures and it’s the superior people who are so
self-contained over long periods as not to need the inconsequential
companionship that goes with a party or a night out. We all know a few.
They’re either super-human beings or they’re a little strange. We need
each other and we need to get away from each other. We need proximity
and distance, conversation and silence.
We almost always get more of each than we want at any one time.
Finding the Balance
This morning I was driving to work at about 6:45, enjoying my own thoughts and the warm red glow just below the horizon, when the weatherman on the radio said the sun would be coming up at 7:14.
Finding the Balance 131
“It’s gradually getting lighter earlier,” Herman said gleefully, as though it were good news.
There’s no way to predict what’s going to depress us but I suddenly found myself depressed. There were emanations of the arrival of spring in that earlier sunrise. I realized a new season was coming and I hadn’t