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A congenital cardiac lesion meant either certain death without surgery, or possible death with it, for Clarke Moustakas’ five-year-old-daughter. The crisis of decision and the agonies during the resolution opened to him “an intensive and timeless experience of the self. The sudden recognition and depth of my own loneliness was a revelation which changed the nature of my life.” This short book was conceived after he underwent this deeply personal and shaking experience.
One evening while at his daughter's bed-side, she developed a convulsive seizure. Standing by helplessly as the necessary treatments were instituted, he writes, “I could feel her pain and terror in my nerves and bones and tissues and blood, but at the same time I knew in that moment no matter how fervently I lived with her, how much I wanted to share it with her, I knew she was alone, beyond my reach. I want so much for her to feel my presence, but she could not. She was beyond my call, beyond the call of anyone. It was her situation in a world entirely and solely her own. There was nothing further I could do. Each time she screamed her voice ripped through me penetrating deeply into my inner being.” As she fell asleep finally, he said, “I stood in a frozen position for several hours, not moving at all, completely without feeling, and in a state of total nothingness … there was no way to share this loneliness, this experience of fear and shock, and isolation.”
Stemming from this experience, he began to search more deeply into the whole problem of loneliness. He listened with more awareness to the personal accounts of similar experiences of others who had faced death or destruction. He culled the literature, extracting autobiographical reports of loneliness: Admiral Byrd facing the horrifying aloneness of an Antarctic expedition; Herman Buhl recounting his solitary ascent to the top of Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas, after he had been cut off from the expedition; Saint Exupery lost in the desert; and Med