Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the café, since I said No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal life. Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the expensive and flawless white paper. Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tolled with a design of rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover. The thick pages are ruled in light blue—you are practical, so thoughtful, and you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all. Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own laments…ah, that sound. The only think missing here is the smell of the ink, but we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine and deep a black mark as I choose to make. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it. The questions of social isolation and loneliness in senior years will be discussed here. A distinction is made between the two: to be socially isolated is to have few contacts with family and community; to be lonely is to have an unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. The one is objective, the other subjective and, as we shall see, the two do not coincide. The poorest people, socially as well as financially, were those most isolated from family life. Social isolation needs to be measured by reference to objective criteria. The problem is rather like that of measuring poverty. “Poverty” is essentially a relative rather than an absolute term, and discovering its extent in a population is usually divided into two stages. Most people agree on the first stage, which is to place individuals on a scale according to their income; they often disagree about the second, which involved deciding how far up the scale the poverty “line” should be drawn. They task of measuring isolation can also be divided in this way by placing individuals on a scale according to their degree of isolation and by drawing a line at some point on the scale so that those below the line would, by common consent, be called “isolated.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

There were 20 people who were very isolated. Their ages ranged from 64 to 83. They comprised two married women, two widowers, eight widows, five spinsters and three bachelors. Thirteen of them lived alone; 12 had no children and half of the rest had sons only. It is worth examining their circumstances, taking first those with children. Four of the eight with surviving children had daughters. One was a widow living with her only daughter, unmarried; she had few other relatives and all lived outside London. The second was a widow who had come with her only daughter from Scotland after the war, leaving friends and relatives behind. They were together until the housing authorities of her daughter’s children lived with her but she saw the rest of the family once a week or less. The third was a very infirm widow whose only daughter was married to a naval officer, obliged to live near Portsmouth; she lived in the same house as a widowed and childes sister and saw her every day but infirmity prevented other social contacts. The fourth was a widower of 80 who said his daughter and son living in Bethnal Green visited him twice a week to see he was all right but did not spend much time with him, now his wife was dead; he had a drink with a friend twice a week but infirmity precluded other activities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The other four very isolated people with children had sons only. One was a married woman whose only son had moved into his wife’s home district outside London; she and her husband had only one relative in Bethanl Green, the wife’s unmarried sister, who was seen each week, and they had no friends or outside social activities, largely because the husband could not walk. Another was a widower, living with an unmarried son, who saw two married sons about once a week; he had no other surviving relatives. The two remaining people were both widows living alone. One had three sons living outside London, two of them visited her once a week; she saw a sister and two mature aunts in Bethnal Green every week but she spent much of her time on her own. The other had two illegitimate sons but no other relatives; she saw these sons occasionally. There remained the childless and the unmarried. Most were in a worse position. The 10 most isolated people of the 203 interviewed were all unmarried or childless. The circumstances of two are summarized below. Miss Paley, 67 years of age, lived in a one bedroom flat. It was a large airless room with dismal orange-brown wallpaper peeling off in huge strips. Two or three mats, ingrained with dirt, covered the floor. There was an old iron bedstead propped up in the middle by two bits of wood and on this was a heap of gray and brown blankets. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

An ancient iron mangle stood in a corner and there was a gas stove, a gas mantel for lighting, three or four wooden chairs and a table with a flat-iron propping up one of its legs. Miss. Paley wore a pair of stockings, extensively patched and tied around her knees, and a ramshackle navy-blue skirt and slip. Her skin had the whiteness of someone who rarely went out and she was very shy of her appearance, particularly the open sores on her face. She said she suffered from blood poisoning, but had not seen her doctor since the war. (This was confirmed by the doctor.) She was the only child of parents who had been street traders and who had died when she was young, in the 1880s, “I was with my aunt until I was nearly 40. She was 85 when she died. I had cousins in the street traders and who had died. I had cousins in the street but they were my aunt’s children. In the war they got scattered. They all had families to bring up and I have not met them since the war. I do not know where they are. I do my work in my own way. They would not have the patience with me.” Persistent questioning failed to reveal a singe relative with whom she has any contact. She did not g to the cinema, to a club or to church, and had no radio. She had spent Christmas on her own and had never had a holiday away from home. She sometimes made conversation with her neighbors in the street but because of her appearance did not go into their homes or hers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

She had only one friend, a young woman who “used to live in the street where I lived,” and they visited one another about once a week. Her answer to a question about membership of a club was typical of much she said. “No, I cannot be shut in. I do not go to those clubs. They had been too much excitement for me.” At one point she said she went to bed about 8pm and got up between 10am and 11am the next day. I also found she had an hour or two in bed in the afternoons.” Mr. Fortune, 76 years of age, lived alone in a two-room council flat. There were two wooden chairs, an orange box converted into a cupboard, a gas stove, a table covered with newspaper, a battered old pram with tins and boxes inside, a pair of wooden steps and little else in the sitting-room. There was no fire, although the interview took place on a cold February morning. Mr. Fortune had been a cripple from birth and he was partly deaf. He was unmarried and his give siblings were dead. An older widowed sister-in-law lived about a mile away with an unmarried son and daughter. These three and two married nieces living in another East London borough were seen from once a month to a few times a year. Asked how often he saw his sister-in-law Mr. Fortune said, “Only when I go there. It is a hard job to walk down there in the Winter time and I have not seen her for three of four months.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Asked about a gentleman’s club Mr. Fortune said, “No. I am simply as I am now. I should not like to join. Walking is such a painful job for me. I cannot get any amusement out of it.” He spoke to one or two of the neighbors outside his flat but he had no regular contact with any of them. He had one regular friend, living a few blocks away, who came over to see him on a Sunday about once a month, “more when there is fine weather.” He was not a churchgoer, never went to a cinema, rarely went to a pub because he could not afford a drink, had never had a holiday in his life and spent Christmas on his own. “My nephew came down for an hour. He gave me a little present, a Digital Storm Lynx Gaming PC, and the Canon EOS 6D Digital SLR Camera. No, I did not get any cards.” He received a non-contributory pension and supplementary assistance through the National Assistance Board, which recently arranged for him to have a woman home-help for two hours a week. Her regular call was the main event of the week. “I sit here messing about. Last week I was making an indoor aerial. I made those steps over there. I like listening to the wireless and making all manners of things. My time is taken up, I can tell you, with that and cooking and tidying-up.” The most striking fact about the most isolated people was that they had few surviving relatives, particularly near relatives of their own or of succeeding generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

This lent special significance to familiar references to fathers having weaker ties with children than mothers, to sons being drawn into their wives’ families, and to distant relatives being lost sight of after the death of “connecting” relatives. The isolated included a comparatively high number of unmarried and childless people, of those possessing sons but not daughters and of those without siblings. Rarely did they have friends, become members of clubs or otherwise participate in outside social activities in compensation. Nearly all of them where retired and most were infirm; some were why of revealing to others how ill or poverty-stricken they were or how they have “let themselves go.” They had little or no means of regular contact with the younger generation, and for one reason or another could not be brought into club activities. One of the most striking results of the whole inquiry was that those living in relative isolation from family and community did not always say they were lonely. Particular importance was attached during the interviews to “loneliness.” The question was not asked until most of an individual’s activities had been discussed and care was taken to ensure as serious and as considered a response as possible. One difficulty had to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

A few people liked to let their children think they were lonely so the latter would visit them as much as possible. If children were present, this meant they were not inclined to give an honest answer. In an early interview one married woman, asked whether she ever got lonely, said, “Sometimes I do when they are all at work.” However, she hesitated before answering and looked at two married daughters, who were in the room. When this woman was alone, on a subsequent call, she told me she was “never lonely really, but I like my children to call.” When interviewed, a widow who was along, said she was never lonely. In fascinating contrast to this was a statement of one of her married daughters, who was interviewed independently. “She is not too badly off. The most she complains of is loneliness. She is always wanting us to go up there.” When the senior was alone, care was therefore taken to ask about loneliness so far as possible, and to check any answer which seemed doubtful. Some people living at the center of a large family complained of loneliness and some who were living in extreme isolation repeated several times with vigor that they were never lonely—such as Miss Paley and Mr. Fortune, described above. Despite there being a significant association between isolation and loneliness about a half of the isolated and rather isolated said they were not lonely; over a fifth of the first group said they were. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Spirituality is something that can keep people from being lonely. When it liberates one from the yoke of the commandments to the freedom of the Spirit, the work of the Spiritual Presence in a being reaches its height. This is like a release from the sentence of death to a new life. A tremendous experience lies behind such words, an experience in which we all can share, but one that is rare in its full depth, and is then a revolutionary power that, through beings like Paul and Augustine and Luther, changes the Spiritual World, and, through it, the history of humankind. Can we, you and I, share in such an experience? First, have we not all felt the deadening power of the written code, written not only in the ten commandments and their many interpretations in the Bible and history, but also with the authoritative pen of parents and society into the unconscious depths of our being, recognized by our conscience judging us by what we do and, above all, by what we are? Nobody can flee from the voice of this written code, written internally as well as externally. And if we try to silence it, to close our ears against it, the Spirit itself frustrates these attempts, opening our ears to the cries of our true being of that which we are and ought to be in the sight of eternity. We cannot escape this judgment against us. The Spirit itself, using the written code, makes this impossible. For the Spirit does not give life without having led us through the experience of Hell. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

And certainly, the written code in its threatening majesty has the power to kill. It kills the joy of fulfilling our being by imposing upon us something we feel as hostile. It kills the freedom of answering creatively what we encounter in things and beings by making us look at a table of laws. It kills our ability to listen to the calling of the moment, to the voiceless voice of others, and to the here and now. It kills our courage to act through the scruples of our anxiety-driven conscience. And among those who take it most seriously, it kills faith and hope, and throws them into self-condemnation and despair. There is no way out from the written code. The Spirit itself prevents us from becoming compromisers, half fulfilling, half defying the commandments. The Spirit itself calls us back when we try to escape into indifference, or lawlessness, or (most usually) average self-righteousness. However, when the Spirit calls us back, it does so not in order to hold us within the written code, but in order to give us life. How can we describe the life that the Spirit gives us? I could use many words, well known to everybody, spoken by Paul himself, and after him by the great preachers and teachers of the church. I could say that the work of the Spirit, liberating us from the law, is freedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Or I could say that its work is faith, or that its work is grace, and above all, that the Spirit creates love, the love in which all laws are confirmed and fulfilled and at the same time overcome. However, if I used such words, the shadow of the absent God would appear and make you and me aware that we cannot speak like this today. If we did, freedom would be distorted into willfulness, faith into belief in the absurd, hope into unreal expectations, and love—the word I would like most to use for the creation of the Spirit—into sentimental feeling. The Spirit must give us new words, or revitalize old words to express true life. We must wait for them; we must pray for them; we cannot force them. However, we know, in some moments of our lives, what life is. We know that it is great and holy, deep and abundant, ecstatic and sober, limited and distorted by time, fulfilled by eternity. And if the right words fail us in the absence of God, we may look without words at the image one in whom the Spirit and the Life are manifest without limits. One responds to the inner call according to one’s capacity, history, one’s circumstances and perspective. There was a British doctor, George Pickering, who wrote a book called Creative Malady, subtitled “Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

In this book, the successful people we listened are covered, but the author could have added Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven—these were all writers and musicians who had a malady, and George Pickering, the author, points out that each one suffered severe illness and met it constructively in creativity and in contribution to our culture. Pickering speaks of his own arthritic hips as “an ally,” and he “put them to bed,” he said, “when they become painful.” In bed he cannot attend committee meetings; cannot see patients or entertain visitors. He adds, “These are the ideal conditions for creative work—freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life.” Now you have many questions in your mind about what I am saying, and I certainly had, and have, many questions also. Otto Rank, as a matter of fact, wrote a whole book, Art and Artist, on [these ideas]…Overcoming neurosis and creating art are identical things in Rank’s work. What I am doing tonight is challenging our whole view of health in our culture. We keep people living day after day because we think it is simply the number of days you live. We struggle to invent ways to live longer, as though infirmary were the ultimate enemies. Our health is our only priority. If we obey the dying nurse, whose constant care is not to please, but to remind of ours, and Adam’s curse and that to be restored, our we must heal and grow better. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

These are tremendously significant things—if you can take them in. When we think about Adam’s curse, this is referring to the fact that we are all the ultimate children of the myth of Adam—this is called in words that do not sound very nice anymore—this is called original sin, and the whole idea is that life is not a question of how long you live. It is not a question of how many days you can add. Many people would much prefer to go when their work is finished—to die—but what this verse is trying to say is that disease and illness mean something quite different from what most people in our Faustian civilization take then to mean. As alienating as illness is, it can also be a connecting of ourselves with new others on a new and deeper level. We see this in compassion. Creativity is one of the products of the right relationship between nature and infinity within us. We see also another gift which Fromm Reichmann certainly had, which Abe Maslow had, which Harry Stack Sullivan had—the gift of compassion, the ability to feel with other people, the ability to understand their problems—this is the other quality that makes a good psychiatrist. The experience of degeneration and of chaos is, I hope, temporary, but this can often be used as a way of reforming or reorganizing ourselves on a higher level. The Gods return in our charity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It is fair for each of us to ask ourselves what do we bring to the quest: what equipment, qualities, and virtues to entitle me to ask for the results I seek? When the sublime light of the Ideal shines down upon one and one has the courage to look at one’s own image by it, one will doubtless make some humiliating discoveries about oneself. One will find that one is worse than one believed and not so wise as one thought oneself to be. However, such discoveries are all to the good. For only then can one know what one is called upon to do and set to work following their pointers in self-improvement. However deep one’s commitment to the quest may be, one will have to reckon with one’s own frailties and one’s environmental pressures. The great being knows one has limitations, one knows one’s defects and faults—but one is not afraid of them. Paint me as I am, lips and all. All do not start with equal capacities for the quest. Each is qualified to go only a certain distance upon it. Those who exaggerate their capacities harm themselves by the presumption. Those who underrate them practise a false modesty. It is an error either to deceive oneself about one’s aspirations or to deter oneself unduly. Hope is good for beings: it confers endurance, spurs beneficial attitudes, and urges endeavour upon one. However, if its base is ungrounded fancy and extravagant wishes, one is hurt rather than benefited by it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Begin by admitting that one knows really little or nothing about your deeper mind. That is better than learned tall talk. It is much easier to set oneself a discipline than to keep it. This will engage one’s own creative faculties through application, and will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic of synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you start to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. When the inner blessings spills from the crown into outer darkness then mold and shape the energy of the spirit as a clear vision of what you want to achieve or accomplish through your process of prayer. The energy of God is then grounded by reversing negativity and moving more spiritual harmony in your being. Our faith feeds and grows in power as our consciousness expands. Every human being is an emanation of the void and unlimited possibility. As out consciousness expands, we unite and the knowledge of all and eternity becomes ours once again. We are simply taking back infernal wisdom which was ours to begin with. “Hear and know the commandments of God, and stir them up in remembrance of the oath which they have made,” reports Mosiah 6.3. However, when a being turns belief in the superior knowledge of the guide into belief in the virtual omniscience of the guide, it is dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

(The photos are from a furnished model home very similar to the house featured.)

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