“Alone, alone, all, all alone” cried the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s famous poem. So he was, and from a literary point of view he made the most of the experience. It’s rare to be alone, especially these days. Today’s ancient mariner is more likely to be on a cruise ship with two thousand other ancient mariners.

But sometimes we find ourselves, in the inescapable cliché, alone in a crowd. It happened to me recently when I spent five days on my own in Paris. I hadn’t been alone in Paris for fifty years.

There’s a great difference between just being somewhere and being alone in the same place. With your familiar and loved companion(s) travel is disciplined by routines and narratives that you have come to share. Alone, it’s just you and them, the strangers. So you are twice as alert. Every experience is heightened, and every encounter is potentially special.

It seems to me that some of the very best travel memoirs have been written by lone travelers like Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Theroux. A picaresque travel fiction requires a comic sidekick (Sancho Panza, Dr. Pangloss) to push the plot along. But a pure travel story is more like a pilgrimage – a solitary adventure that mixes observation with reflection.

Some people cope better than others with being alone. The worst mistake is to use time alone to think about yourself, which can drive you straight into therapy. As John Barth observed: “Self-knowledge is always bad news.” The great opportunity for the solitary traveler is not to cultivate his or her own neuroses but to give one hundred per-cent attention to new people and places.

We humans are a sociable species. That’s how we survive. We have the self-protective herd instinct that tells us to conform, follow the leader, and go with the crowd. This behavior can be seen in its purest form in your local high school, where ‘fitting in’ is practically a religion.

What makes us different from cows or lemmings is that we can and do break away from the herd, and think our separate thoughts. We are bees with a perspective on the hive, which allows us to evolve and to create. This also gives us a headache.

The moments when we are separated from the swarm, mentally or physically, are precious, potentially creative spaces, when we can actually reflect on what (for want of a better phrase) I have to call the meaning of life. Even though Monty Python made an international joke out of it, the meaning of life is still a pretty important question.

We can travel to the ends of the earth, but even the deserts and mountains are crowded. “Remote” Mount Everest is a major tourist attraction. Resorts ironically offer “Relaxation and solitude,” when you and they know that thousands of others will be sharing the same solitary experience. Solitude, when we find it, is all in the mind.

This may be what happens to people who hide away in remote writers’ colonies, hoping that peace and quiet will bring the inspiration that everyday life had failed to bring. Thoreau wrote these famous lines about solitude:

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as solitary as a dervish in the desert.”Henry David Thoreau: Walden

Yet Thoreau was constantly involved with people, with nature, and with his own philosophy. He was no more solitary than I was in Paris, surrounded by eight million people and holding surreal conversations in bad French with quite a few of them. No great literary insights came out of this, but there was never a dull moment.