Talking to oneself is not respectable. It suggests many things, none of them good: abysmal loneliness, a mental screw loose, a social wire frayed, insanity, dementia. Shukan Post magazine this month cites experts in dementia who see solitary dialogue as a potential premonitory sign — not a conclusive one, but one that bears watching, as a symptom or a cause of a descent into a place we'd all rather avoid, from which few return alive.

And yet, there are things one can say only to oneself! Thoughts, ideas, feelings — nameless joy, unaccountable sadness — well up in the soul; they demand expression. A musician can express them in music, a dancer in dance, but such transcendent talents belong to very few. The rest of us have only language. If what we seek to express is beyond language, our talk will sound like babble — demented.

The sympathetic and understanding ear of a friend is priceless but rare — a truth recognized of old. To take it no farther back than the 14th century, the monk Kenko (1284-1350), in "Essays in Idleness," mused: "How delightful it would be to converse intimately with someone of the same mind, sharing with him the pleasures of uninhibited conversation on the amusing and foolish things of this world, but such friends are hard to find. If you must take care that your opinions do not differ in the least from those of the person with whom you are talking, you might just as well be alone."