There is a tension in the way people think between the fascination and epic quality of one person representing great and noble qualities in a lone life; from the knights errant of the Europe to the Ronin of the East taking in Gurus along the way; against the need to be in a community. It is as if in the lost past of our species we hanker for the Serengeti, for the strength and understanding to get by in life with no recourse to others, while we know all the time that the benefits of society have come to us because we work in communities.
Perhaps we feel that the benefits 0f comfort, ready food and material help through the division of labour do not outweigh the loss of facing life head-on and surviving. In popular myth the single wanderer is nearly always a hero type whereas in real life they were just as likely to be brigands and murders. But we still keep some sense of loneliness in the crowd because we pit person against person, family against family in nearly all our societies.
And yet for all that to see a man living in a jungle with a family of adopted tigers, or meet an artists who lives alone on a mountain side and paints it every day to perfect his skill, or even to bump into modern knights errant, gives one a greater sense of being human than getting the bus into work everyday.
I wonder why.