The lonely have often found comfort outdoors. In The Living Mountain, an unfussy meditation on Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, Nan Shepherd writes: “Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.” Shepherd never married; her ambiguous relationship with philosopher John Macmurray remains the only love affair in her biography. But amid the rough beauty of the Cairngorms, she found a rarer sort of companionship. 

Few of us live near such magnificent landscapes, nor are surrounded by so few people, but taking a Shepherdian approach to our surroundings can quell the loneliness that arises even among those living i...