Alone or Lonely

A group of us, sitting around the table after a dinner-party recently, got to talking about loneliness; and someone said:
"There's a big difference, you know,between being lonely and being alone", and we each stopped and thought about that for a while before anyone else spoke, because I suppose, each one of us in different ways had experienced both.
For some, coming home to an empty house is lonely; finding the bed still not made, and the pots, sometimes as many as three days' pots, piled in the sink, waiting. Drinking coffee black, because the four-day-old milk, even in the fridge, has gone off and needs to be malodorously poured away down the cluttered sink. Rummaging for a clean shirt in the pile of washed-but-not-ironed clothes in the laundry, and wearing a pullover, even when the weather's hot, to disguise the creases.

But being a loner has its compensations. Thoreau had the right idea when he wrote about how the loner can choose when to leave on a journey, but loses the initiative when travelling with someone else. Yes, that's right, Thoreau, Henry David from America. No!, he wasn't French; that's why his writing has such an air of originality, not having suffered at the whim of the translator; and perhaps that's why I enjoy him. For now that I too am a loner, I have the time to read him and to march to the drum-beat that I alone hear.