Togetherness

What is it that makes us not want to be alone – at least, not all the time?

The poet William Cowper put the question this way some 300 years ago:

How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper—solitude is sweet.

Not that there is any biological necessity.  Even among mammals, there are species whose members seek each other out only for the sake of reproduction. And there is the well-known difference between dogs and cats which has prompted the expression, for any prolonged difficulty in getting things to stay together in a group, that “it’s like herding cats.”

But our own species is notorious for pairing males and females. Some call it “sex.”  Some even call it – at least in the early stages, “love.”  Anthropologists will tell you how much it differs from region to region. Songwriters celebrate its universal nature, with ditties like “The more we are together, the happier we shall be.”  But the most basic and widespread form of togetherness is known as the “family” — a matter of genealogical relationship. However, very few such human units are known to be historically traceable for more generations than can be counted on your fingers.

One out-of-school lesson I remember learning on some childhood playground said that “Two’s Company – Three’s a Crowd – Four is too many – and Five’s not allowed.”  (I went to schools in three different English-Speaking countries, so I’m not sure of the national origin of this piquant expression.)

But of course the rules of many games specify a certain number of players. In Britain, and a number of former members of the British Empire, including India and the West Indies, the magic number is eleven, the traditional size of a Cricket team. In the card game of Bridge, it is four, with the four sides of a card table being designated as North, South, East and West. Many social situations and relationships can be said to have begun with someone seeking “a fourth for Bridge.” With Tennis, many variations have developed from the original one-on-one, which gave us the classic theatrical line, “Anyone for Tennis?” This line – or something like it – was alleged to have been Humphrey Bogart’s first line on the stage but, as with many celebrity legends, he always denied it.

People can be brought together in many strange circumstances, such as survivors of a shipwreck being marooned on an island.  I must warn you about the next story, that it depends on a pun:

The tale is being told to a stolid matron by a young woman who was for some time the only female among those rescued with several crew members from a small island.  The matron is aghast “Good Heavens!” She interjects, “I trust you could remain chaste!” “Chased?” comes the reply – “You bet I was!  — all over the bloody island!”

But other kinds of disasters, including earthquakes and typhoons, not to mention those brought on in the wake of war, have put people together who would never otherwise have encountered each other.

The Scottish writer J.M. Barrie, best known for his creation of “Peter Pan,” wrote a more than amusing play called “The Admirable Crichton” (pronounced “Cry-ton) which satirized the British Class System, a social order which was then (1902) still in full flower. In the play, an aristocratic family is shipwrecked on an island, together with their butler, Crichton. Previously the social order was rigidly defined by birth, rank, and occupation – but on this island it becomes evident that Crichton is a natural leader, which definitely wasn’t true of his hitherto boss.

But the human need or desire for contact with others is embodied everywhere in clubs and associations of numerous kinds in every society, occupation, and profession.  Even writers, despite (or maybe because of) the solitary nature of our craft, get together in various ways.  Sometimes we even marry each other – as was the case, to the great benefit of Literature — of Percy Shelley with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and of Robert Browning with Elizabeth Barret.

At the other extreme, it is well-known in Criminology that one of the most severe forms of punishment is “solitary confinement.”  There used to be whole prisons in which each inmate had to endure that penalty for the entire length of his sentence. But our more “humane” society has abandoned that system.

It seems that a certain amount of togetherness is now considered a fundamental human right.