A CAVE OF ONE’S OWN

in which I am considering the practice of “autosuficiencia” & my forthcoming existential crisis

This past weekend, I read this wild story about a woman who spent 500 days alone, underground, in a cave. Not sure why I’m positioning this like a fairy tale—this was a New Yorker profile, a true story about a real, living woman, Beatriz Flamini. (You can read it here.)

I felt nuts reading this article. 

Until this point, I’d been spending an otherwise pleasant Saturday alone, content with my own company, first on a visit to the MCA, and now, on my couch, curled up with the cats and with my stack of magazines next to us. (You’re never alone when you have a cat! Or better yet, two!) 

Let me back up a bit. Initially I felt great: this opening hooked me. Who is this woman?

When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. “I really liked being there,” she says. She’d read books to her dolls and write on a chalkboard while giving them lessons in math or history. As she got older, she told me, she sometimes imagined being a professor like Indiana Jones: the kind who slipped away from the classroom to “be who he really was.”

In the early nineteen-nineties, while Flamini was studying to be a sports instructor, she visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend drove north of Madrid to El Reguerillo, a cavern known for its paleolithic engravings. “We stayed until Sunday and came out only because we had classes and work,” Flamini recalls. El Reguerillo was dark but cozy, and inside its walls she experienced an overwhelming sense of love. “There were no words for what I felt,” she says.

After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. “Everyone wanted me for their classes,” she says. “They fought over me.” By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn’t really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn’t want children. She experienced an existential crisis. “You know you’re going to die—today, tomorrow, within fifty years,” Flamini told herself. “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” The immediate answer, she remembers, was to “grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains.”

Aside from this whole part about her experiencing “an overwhelming sense of love” while visiting a cave—what? HOW? I felt like initially I understood Flamini. I liked this idea of her as an independent, eccentric little girl bossing around her dolls and as she got older, imagining to be a professor, and better yet, Indiana Jones! 

I had to re-read the part about her experiencing an existential crisis at 40 a few times, though—and no, this isn’t about a certain someone who is also about to turn 40 next month (moi)—but rather, I kept reading “What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?” as:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

Wait, no. Mary Oliver she is not, but I guess it’s a similar sentiment? And turns out what she wanted to do with her one wild and precious life was to go work “as a caretaker at a mountain refuge” —I don’t even know what that means, but that’s a helluva way to handle turning 40. So far, on the cusp of turning 40, I mostly just indulge in short-lived fantasies of quitting my corporate job and working in a used bookstore or living in a loft in Paris, writing poetry and making collages, or maybe some combination of both ideas, which of course take place in a world where money is no object and my French is far better than it actually is (and my cats and all my loved ones will somehow be along for the ride).

Anyway, I kept losing focus because I wanted some answers. What happened to her partner, her car, her house? Clearly they didn’t come along in her knapsack. We also didn’t jump immediately from her heading off to the mountains in 2013 to the 500 days in the cave—that wouldn’t happen until 2021—but my questions remain. 

Here’s where I started feeling especially squirmy:

Her basic goal remained intact: to neither see nor speak to another human being for five hundred days. She didn’t even want to see her own face. “I wanted total disconnection,” she says. If her expedition worked as planned, it would feel somewhat like spending a year and a half inside a sensory-deprivation tank.

And then, the realities of being alone, underground (I know you were wondering this, too!):

After five defecations, she would carry her waste, in plastic pouches, up to the exchange point, and then hurry back down. 

Overall, it’s a fascinating story, and I’d recommend reading it, but can’t say I am now inclined to visit a cave.

I suppose I’m sharing all this because I caught up on this story right as I’d been putting a lot of thought toward how I can better balance solitude with the company of others. I live alone and primarily work from home, and have since— you already know when, why am I about to write it out, I’m doing it anyway—March 2020. So while I have my friendships, my Phil, and my family not all too far away, that’s still a lot of time to myself. I certainly don’t need to go off to the mountains or underground to get time alone.

Ultimately, in spite of Flamini’s adamance that she was happy underground, she did share this:

The cave experience was not something that she “would recommend to anyone,” she said, adding, “I didn’t exactly lose consciousness, but the darkness saps you of life.” She went on, “The solitude, the social uprooting, it consumes you. Or, to put it a better way, you eat—you down nutrients—but you consume yourself.” 

I mean… yeah? Sounds absolutely fucking terrible. Her description reminded me of some of the loneliest, darkest days of the pandemic. No wonder I was feeling squirmy. I reminded myself I was not stuck in this apartment; I had chosen this for my Saturday! 

I texted some friends (about movies, not about my looming existential crisis) and put on The Beguiled (2017), having also just read a profile on Sofia Coppola. Yes, clearly I was and am deeply influenced by my New Yorker reads!

I went to bed early on Saturday night, eager to see and speak to another human.

I picked Phil up for breakfast the next morning and he was more handsome than he’d ever been. 

The sun was shining, above ground, all of us in it, together and alone.