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ENTER RELATIONSHIPS

There is no enjoying the possession of anything

valuable unless one has someone to share it with.

—SENECA

fter his first marriage fell apart in the 1960s, the songwriter
Johnny Cash moved from Southern California to Tennessee. On
the first night in his new home, lonely and depressed, he began to
pace the length of the ground floor. It was an enormous house, all
but empty of furniture, wedged between a steep hill on one side and
Old Hickory Lake on the other. As he walked from one end of the
floor to the other, from the hill to the lake, he began to feel, almost
frantically, that something was absent.
What’s missing? he thought. Where is it? he repeated, over and
over again. Had he forgotten to pack something? Was there
something he needed to do? What wasn’t right?
Suddenly, it came to him. It wasn’t something, it was someone.
His young daughter, Rosanne. She wasn’t there. She was in
California with her mother. A house without family is no home.
Johnny Cash stopped, began to shout her name as loud as he could,
and fell to the ground and wept.
In some sense, it might seem like that is exactly the kind of
anguish that philosophy helps us avoid through the cultivation of
detachment and indifference to other people. If you don’t make
yourself dependent on anyone, if you don’t make yourself vulnerable,
you can never lose them and you’ll never be hurt.