December 8th, 2005, 11:30 am

Quoted: Beautiful defense of the personality that lives alone

Salon.com’s Cary Tennis responding to a 43-year-old newly married woman who was having trouble cohabitating:

[... M]any people have the same problem: Identity, or consciousness, or well-being, can be a delicate crystalline structure as well; any interruption and the identity crashes. Consciousness becomes muddled. There are people who are not writers who nonetheless live in the imagination, whose identities and sense of the world are precarious structures. They read books and think about the ideas in the books. Or they wake up from a dream-filled sleep and want to think about the dreams, which hover on the edge of consciousness. So even having to say hello to another person in the morning can make the whole thing collapse.

Such people can find it difficult not to have control of their own space.