On solitude

Emerson, for instance, left his sick wife, Lidian, and their young children in Thoreau’s care to go to Europe in 1847, writing coldly to Lidian, ‘I foresee plainly that the trick of solitariness never can leave me.’

As suggested two posts ago here, it seems that companionship, or what the biopsychologists like to term as “peer-bonding,” has been cognitively advantageous. Our evolved intellect is bound to our sociality. Memory and the logical proceedings that come with attempting to troubleshoot relationships are augmented with every flex of the social muscle. It has been empirically shown that those older adults who engage in conversation, who are prompted to climb out into the world and sense it like their younger counterparts do, create themselves a sort of buffer against mental decline. And what are we if we do not hold our minds intact? (An entirely separate question to address on another date.)

While this is all well and good, you might be asking yourself, “So you’re saying I should join in with the bacchanals rather than lock myself in this room and in a gust of solitary spirit, finish this essay?” Well, you are talking to one of those curious people who have been wooed by the inexplicable allure of solitude — who desperately defends her own autonomy in spite of her acknowledgment of the inevitable importance of communities. I’d like to explore the other side of the coin in this post (completely contrary to what I had spoke of two weeks ago) and articulate the dichotomy that exists between individualism and social participation, and how this might begin to be reconciled.

Quotes that follow strike a note deep within my reclusive marrow.

In Still Life with Woodpecker by Tom Robbins, it is astutely said that it is “funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us.” I nod in emphatic agreement. “Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better,” says Henry Rollins. Rollins brings up a good point: loneliness is charged with an entirely different sentiment, a sort of indignation with your rupture with the web society, a twinge of misery in accompaniment with your self-imposed isolation. Replace “loneliness” with “solitude” and I would be more apt to agree, although I am a proponent of exposing oneself to feeling a wide, wondrous spectrum of emotions. I merely enjoy hanging in existence between all the action, attempting to get to the bottom of things rather than bother, at critical moments, with the often frivolous requisites that waver at the surface of most civilized interactions. Now, you might be wondering what has happened in my biographical past that has made me so jaded, and perhaps even so selfish? Perhaps I deserve an end as miserable as Christopher McCandless, the youth that had passed in an abandoned bus in the novel-turned-movie, Into the Wild, in a stint that emblemized his distaste with civilization. “Didn’t you know that the tragedy was that he realized too late that true joy lay in the relationships that we cultivate?!” No, I think the tragedy was that he had foolishly eaten mold. That may be an extreme case, and I must clarify that I argue from the standpoint of the artist, the tinkerer with life, the one who capitalizes on consciousness in order to synthesize. Every great writer, scientist, musician needed to shut the door to their companions in order to fully, and hungrily take in the world from the vantage point of an outsider. The mark of a genius within any field is his or her innate devotion to the subject – their willingness to engage in investigative learning, and this often occurs on time away from others. The great physicist Richard Feynman, as a child, would watch a ball move in a wagon and found himself plagued with an unabating curiosity to know why it would move like that. He built radios and tuned them to programs, not because this was his part-time job and that money was the incentive, but because he wanted to understand how things worked and what would result if he played with the world out there. These people had that moment of peace within their minds that facilitated their noticing of a pattern, and oftentimes, this required at least a brief disentanglement with social relationships. Einstein said, “I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

Like everything else that we know and do, the best results seem to come from abiding with the rule of moderation. It’s a delicate balance between understanding that we will ultimately have some dependence on others by virtue of the fact that we are human beings, by virtue of the fact that we need other people to register something as sophisticated and momentous as empathy — and embracing that other half of ourselves that rises to meet the world alone, to level our eyes with it in our own, solitary bodies, and to investigate it. Then, the next step is to take what we discover and present it to others in whatever manner we deem fit. Feynman became a renowned lecturer and teacher at the height of his career. Emerson’s influence had been felt by Thoreau and we all feel his presence in literature classrooms and libraries today. In all these situations, the key initial stimulus however was a moment of solitude — an aside and a breath on one’s own terms.

Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.