Thoughts On Solitude

Joseph Epstein turned 87 this year; he is one of those wise people we need to listen to. 

These wonderful thoughts from Epstein are my confirmation bias.  For the past two/three decades there are complaints about the loneliness epidemic and covid exposed people's inability to be with their own self. loneliness and solitude are not the same. 

Hell is other people. For me other people are like alcohol or junk food. It's fun in modicum. 

I always remember this: I was born alone. I will die alone. If I need to see reality as it is in the time in between, I need to immerse myself in it. 

In 2000, Bowling Alone, a book by the political scientist Robert Putnam, held that Americans had lost all sense of community and that “we have become increasingly disconnected from one another and now social structures—whether they be PTA, church, or political parties—have disintegrated.” A review in the Economist declared that “until the publication of this groundbreaking work, no one had so deftly diagnosed the harm that these broken bonds have wreaked on our physical and civic health, nor had anyone exalted their fundamental power in creating a society that is happy, healthy, and safe.”

Family, community, high sociability generally—here was where fulfillment was thought to be found. The vigorously social life was the good life; “was,” but apparently no longer quite is. What happened? With the advent of cellphones, podcasts, social media, and more, everyday living became quicker, more crowded, less under control. Especially among the young, therapy has become more frequent. Not more but fewer friends now seemed the ideal. Solitude has come to seem, to many, not such a bad idea.

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More than two centuries earlier, Montaigne wrote at essay-length on the subject of solitude. “Now the aim of all solitude, I take it, is the same: to live more at leisure and at one’s ease,” he explained. To achieve this, it is “not enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the gregarious instincts that are inside us, we must sequester ourselves and repossess ourselves.” He notes that “real solitude may be enjoyed in the midst of cities and the courts of kings; but it is enjoyed more handily alone,” and adds that “the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” Montaigne lived this ideal, retiring after an active political life for the better part of each of his days to a tower in which he kept his books and lived his private life, enjoying his own thoughts and writing them out in his essays.

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Aging can in itself be an agent of solitude. When young, I made it my business to know the top 10 songs. Now I know no top songs or even the names of popular singers beyond those of Beyoncé, Adele, and Taylor Swift. I once saw every new movie and knew the names not only of the stars but of most character actors. Now, in the checkout line at the supermarket, I read a headline in our version of the gutter press, “Jen Leaves Justin,” and after wondering briefly if Jen is Jennifer Aniston and Justin is Justin Timberlake, remind myself that in any case I could not care less.

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If one has had the good fortune to attain old age, as I at 87 have, more and more of one’s thoughts in solitude are about death. Montaigne would have approved. He held that to deprive death of its strangeness and terror, “let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death…. We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere.” Montaigne adds, “If I were a scribbler I would produce a compendium and commentaries of the various ways men have died.” Montaigne wished to die working on the cabbages in his garden. Instead, alas, he died, painfully, of quinsy, unable to speak owing to paralysis of the tongue, in 1592, at the age of 59.

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What do I achieve in my solitude? The authors of Solitude, whose subtitle again is The Science and Power of Being Alone, base their positive view on the subjects of their own study—that being good at solitude entails “optimism (having a positive outlook on life), a growth mind-set (seeing solitude as an opportunity to reflect and grow), self-compassion (being kind to oneself), curiosity (exhibiting an openness to learning and experiencing wonder and awe), and being present in the moment.” Apart from self-compassion and curiosity, I fail to qualify on any of these grounds.

My own thinking during solitude is unconnected, less than comprehensive, and far from profound. I wonder if, as a writer, I am capable of genuine thought only with a pen in hand or a computer keyboard under my fingers. One of the divisions among writers is that between those who write well but don’t need to write, Thomas Jefferson, Bernard Berenson, Winston Churchill, George Kennan among them; and those who feel themselves less than fully alive when not writing, I a minor figure among these. For me and others who fall into this latter category, André Gide’s “How do I know what I think till I see what I say” applies.

Writing and thinking, for us, in other words, are coterminous. Solitude, in still other words, for all its advertised virtues, may for us be an endeavor of limited value. Nothing for it, then, but to pull up a chair alongside Billie Holiday’s, and bemoan my own quite different relation to solitude.