There is a form of being together that feels as easy and spacious as being alone, when your experience is not crowded out or eclipsed by the presence of the other but deepened and magnified. Such companionship is extremely rare and extremely precious. All other company, no matter how dear, inevitably reaches a saturation point and begins to suffocate. If one is an introvert, that point comes sooner and more violently. A return to solitude then becomes nothing less than a rapture. (View Highlight)
But despite her surface sociality, Macaulay embodied the true test of an introvert — not whether one engages in social activity, but whether one is charged or drained by it. In an essay titled “Departure of Visitors,” she exults in the pleasure of being at last left alone: (View Highlight)
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness. (View Highlight)
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom from which pretenders have taken their leave. (View Highlight)
What to do with all this luscious peace? It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again. Dear visitors, what largesse have you given, not only in departing, but in coming, that we might learn to prize your absence, wallow the more exquisitely in the leisure of your not-being. (View Highlight)
Paradoxically, even Macaulay’s muse was a visitor from whom she eventually needed a break. In another essay, she offers a strikingly similar inner response to finishing a book — that moment when, upon setting down the last word on the last page, the mind becomes uncrowded again. She writes: (View Highlight)
