As she traveled deeper into her own solitary state, she came to understand viscerally what she had before considered only with her reasoning. She had always known that the bonds of human connection are fragile, subject to time, circumstance, and the mystery of slowly altering sympathies, but she had never before doubted that making connection was the norm; it represented a defining trait: the need of intimacy. To make connection was to be in a state of normality. Conversely, to find oneself alone, an isolate without steady or permanent attachment, was –and this, too, she had never doubted– to lay oneself open to the one thing people were pathologically ashamed of being charged with: abnormality. Now, suddenly, it flashed on her that it was loneliness that was the norm. Connection was an ideal: the exception, not the rule, in the human condition. 

 

Much in her life might have contributed to this insight –a disappointing marriage, friendships that had run their course, a passion for motherhood that had also run its course– but more than any of these experiences it was this one, the irreversible separateness she now felt within the ranks of her own movement that supplied the emotional proof: not only is no attachment reliably enduring, but when the most intimate and solid-seeming are dissolved, we experience a sense of aloneness that, surprisingly, is not alien; it is almost as though we feel ourselves returned to some earlier condition. It strikes us then-and this was the revelation –that we are embarrassed by the “return”. It marks us, in our own eyes, as failures at doing life. We shrink from confiding the embarrassment to a living soul, even the nearest of intimates. The reticence creates a distance between ourselves and all others. Inside the distance in the innermost being, we remain solitary. As we grow older, the solitariness increases. Staton looked hard and what she was seeing, and she thought, How unspeakable, then, that worldly arrangements should contribute to the forlornness of one’s natural state! Politics is meant to mitigate the misery to which the human condition consigns us, not add to it.

Vivian Gornick about Elizabeth Cady Staton