The other day an acquaintance of mine, an outgoing and charming man, told me he had found himself unexpectedly alone in New York for an hour or two between appointments. He went to the Whitney and spent the "empty" time looking at things in solitary  happiness. For him it proved to be a shock nearly as great as falling in love to discover that he could enjoy himself so much alone. What had he been afraid of, I asked myself? That, suddenly alone, he would discover that he bored himself, or that there was, quite simply, no self there to meet? But having taken a decisive step, he is now on the edge of adventure; he is about to be launched into his own inner space to the astronaut.  His every perception  will come to him with a new freshness and, for a time, seem surprisingly original. For anyone who can see things for himself with a naked eye becomes, for a moment or two, something of a genius.  With another human being present, vision becomes double vision, unavoidably. We are busy wondering, what does my companion see or think of this, and what do I think of it? The original impact gets lost. "Music I heard with you was more than music." Exactly. And therefore music itself can only be heard alone. Solitude  is the salt of personhood. It brings out the authentic flavor of every experience. "Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, walking in a quiet garden, in a cool house, staying single there." Loneliness is very strongly felt with other people, for with others, even with a lover sometimes, we suffer from our differences of taste, temperament and mood. Human intercourse  often demands that we soften the edge of perception, or withdraw at the very instant of personal truth for fear of hurting, or of being inappropriately present, which is to say naked, in a social situation. Alone we can afford to be wholly whatever we are, and to feel whatever we feel  ly. That is a great luxury! For me the most interesting thing about a solitary life, and mine has been that for the last twenty years, is that it becomes increasingly rewarding. When I can wake up and watch the sun rise over the ocean, as I do most days, and know that I have an entire day ahead, uninterrupted, in which to write a few pages, take a walk with my dog, lie down in the afternoon for a long think (why does one think better in a horizontal position?), read and listen to music, I am flooded with happiness. I'm lonely only when I am overtired, when I have worked too long without a break, when from the time being I feel empty and need filling up. And I am lonely sometimes when I come back home after a lecture trip, when I have seen a lot of people and talked a lot, and am full to the brim  with experience that needs to be sorted out.  Then for a little while the house feels huge and empty, and I wonder where my self is hiding. It has to be recaptured  slowly by watering the plants and perhaps, by looking again at each one as though it were a person.  It takes a while, as I watch the surf blowing up in fountains at the end of the field, but the moment comes when the world falls away, and the self emerges again from the deep unconscious, bringing back all I have recently experienced to be explored and slowly understood, when I can converse  again with my hidden powers, and so grow, and so be renewed, till death do us part. Which of the following is the writer's opinion about being alone?
Being alone is actually an adventure of exploring one's outer space. People are lonely because they lack communication between each other. One can enjoy the authentic flavor of every experience when he is alone. People need to be alone because only then do they have double vision.