This habit is commonly frowned upon. It is a matter of jest in most societies today. There is a theory, however, that not doing so is the root of all human misery. That is the line of reasoning that I follow here.
First, importantly, not being able to talk to yourself is a symptom of deep self doubt. You clearly don’t want to hear what you have to say.
The worst pandemic in modern human history, that is, since 1353, is the loss of our ability to speak to ourselves that is bred at home in front of television screens and nurtured in schools concerned with directives and expectations, and then cemented—solidified—in cubicles, here in this our office nation, where less than 5% of the population grows the food for all the others. I wonder what those farmers think and say as they guide their tractors back and forth over that abused soil.
Being too self-conscious to speak aloud while on the street, and not so fond of the sound of my own voice, I write instead. Writing is. of course, a means of talking to ourselves. Especially in the guise of letters, but when directed by a will to instruct, as with the oddly phrased letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, it can be less useful.
“DEAR BOY,” the lord says “Your distresses in your journey from Heidelberg to Schaffhausen, your lying upon straw, your black bread, and your broken ‘berline,’ are proper seasonings for the greater fatigues and distresses which you must expect in the course of your travels; and, if one had a mind to moralize, one might call them the samples of the accidents, rubs, and difficulties, which every man meets with in his journey through life.” No matter the good intentions, the stiff upper lip of the average Englishman who read this was not helped, other than to feel the cold breath of the abyss between himself and the noblemen, as he stood in the fields on a starry night watching over a herd he did not own and said aloud to himself, ‘Why the hell am I freezing my arse to keep that bloke in fine clothes. Black bread is all I get on any night unless I cut the throat on one of these here dumber fellows. I think I will find a way to get to America. Things might be better there.” But I believe the shepherd definitely talked to himself. The Lord’s son just turned to his father for a better allowance.
But the author was not speaking to himself. He was telling someone else what to think. That is a common glitch in the writing game and why talking to yourself is a far better deal. Someone always listens. And you know who is to blame when you don’t.
My favorite writing is a result of talking to the audience of one. This may only reflect my own worry that there is no one else out there that gives a damn, but it is, I believe an acquired knowledge from many great authors. Patrick Leigh Fermor had hundreds of hours to talk to himself as he walked across Europe in 1933. Thankfully he wrote some of that down in his journals and those were later salvaged from a barn loft in Romania and returned by a farmer to the author some thirty years later so that we all might benefit.
He later wrote, “But there was nothing sinister about the farm people and foresters and woodcutters I spent these evening with. They have left their memory of whiskers and wrinkles and deep eye sockets, of slurred speech and friendly warmth and hospitable kindness. Carved wood teemed in every detail of their dwellings, … the upshot of long winters, early nightfall, soft wood and sharp knives is the same…where each winter begets teeming millions of cuckoo clocks, chamois, dwarfs and brown bears,” and one can imagine the journey of his eyes in the fire dark of those small rooms in distant places, and the things Fermor said to himself in his makeshift bed by the hearth.
Another walker and talker of note is Henry David Thoreau.
“It was very pleasant, when I stayed late in town, to launch myself into the night, especially if it was dark and tempestuous, and set sail from some bright village parlor or lecture room, with a bag of rye or Indian meal upon my shoulder, for my snug harbor in the woods, having made all tight without and withdrawn under hatches with a merry crew of thoughts, leaving only my outer man at the helm, or even tying up the helm when it was plain sailing. I had many a genial thought by the cabin fire as I sailed. I was never cast away nor distressed in any weather, though I encountered some severe storms. It is darker in the woods, even in common nights, than most suppose. I frequently had to look up at the opening between the trees above the path in order to learn my route, and, where there was no cart-path, to feel with my feet the faint track which I had worn, or steer by the known relation of particular trees which I felt with my hands, passing between two pines for instance, not more than eighteen inches apart, in the midst of the woods, invariably, in the darkest night.”
Taking him at his words, he was a far braver fellow than I. And given what he has said to himself in his journals, I think he was that and more.