solitude

King At Last

By in books, solitude

For some reason or other, I’m alone in the office. Although this dawns on me suddenly, I had already vaguely sensed it. In some corner of my consciousness I’d felt a great sigh of relief, a deeper breathing with different lungs.

This is one of the strangest sensations that the fortuity of encounters and absences can bring: that of finding ourselves alone in a place that is normally full of people and noise, or that belongs to someone else. We suddenly have a feeling of absolute ownership, of vast and effortless dominion, and – as I said – of relief and serenity.

How good it feels to be completely alone! To be able to talk to ourselves out loud, to walk around without being looked at, to lean back in an undisturbed reverie! Every house becomes an open field, every room has the breadth of a farm.

The usual sounds are all strange, as if they belonged to a nearby but independent universe. We are kings at last. This is what we all truly long to be, and the most plebeian among us perhaps more ardently than those full of false gold. For a moment we are the universe’s pensioners, recipients of a steady income, with no needs and no worries.

Ah, but in those footsteps climbing the stairs I recognize someone who’s coming here, someone who will interrupt my amused solitude. My implicit empire is about to be invaded by barbarians.

— Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

One of the minor pleasures in my life is to be alone in a building before or after hours. It’s not quite what John Koenig named kenopsia, though. That word gets at the eerie afterimage of human activity, the sadness or uncanniness of a place gone empty. What Pessoa describes is something better: the relief of finding oneself alone in a place normally full of other people, noise, and demands. Not abandonment, then, but reprieve.

I know this feeling best in the warehouse before the day begins. I love to get there before the rest of my crew. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to be the first one in the entire building. No forklifts zooming past, no trailers beeping their way back to the dock, no deliveries needing signatures, no questions. The whole apparatus of work is present, but dormant. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode where someone has pressed pause on reality, only the pause has not affected me. I alone am left moving through the stillness, thinking my thoughts, enjoying a freedom so slight that it almost sounds silly. Other people complain that the empty building is spooky, or even haunted, but I’ve never felt it. I feel like I’m hovering above the day, just observing.

And then, inevitably, the spell is broken by some expected sound: the metal door rolling up, an engine coughing to life, footsteps, a voice. The republic resumes. My brief monarchy is over. But this, too, is part of the pleasure. If it lasted, it would become just another condition of life. What makes it sweet is that it is only an intermission, a little pocket of unclaimed time and space, gone too soon, but soon to return.

Obiter Scripta, no. 88

By in obiter scripta, solitude

LADY CROOM: But surely a hermit who takes a newspaper is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.

— Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, act II, scene 7

I have never subscribed to a newspaper, but I do check in with multiple blogs each day. What can I say? I’m more inclined toward pantheism than otherworldly asceticism. Just because I don’t want to interact with most people doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy observing them from a distance. The world, with all its folly and frivolity, still deserves some love, and as Lou Barlow sang, hypocrites like us deserve a little trust along the way.

Prefer Solitude, Alone to Think

By in jests japes jokes jollies, solitude

See, that kind of mercenary spirit is corrosive to the ornamental hermit ethos. We might be misanthropes, but we’re not greedy. I’m well-fed and left in peace to enjoy my scribbling in exchange for some basic chores. What more do we need? (For any interested readers, I also keep another blog, much less-frequently updated, where I collect quotations from my reading to meditate upon, usually centered on the theme of the tragic nature of existence.)

He Was Always a Thousand Miles Away While Still Standing In Front of Your Face

By in foolosophy, solitude

I remember hearing a song on the radio back in the ’90s by some generic alt-rock band, with a chorus that went, “If I could be all by myself, I could be free.” But as Christopher Knight, the Maine Hermit, noted from experience, true solitude dissolves such romantic adolescent fantasies of authentic selfhood. It sets you free from everything, including meaning and purpose. Most people’s notion of solitude and independence only extends to arm’s length, understandably enough.

Intellectual (or epistemological) solitude, like what Brad Warner is talking about here, has a similarly unsettling effect. If, like Descartes, we sit down to rigorously and thoroughly determine what we really know about the topics we opine about, we’re soon forced to admit that we don’t have the time (or inclination, if we’re feeling especially honest) to become deeply informed. For most of us, in most areas of knowledge, our feeling of certainty rests on Arguments from Various Authorities. If asked “How do you know?” persistently enough, we will end up pointing toward someone else. “Because they said so, and I generally trust them.”

There’s no shame in that, of course. In a world as complex as ours, there’s no way for any individual to be an expert in all the things that matter. Nevertheless, acknowledging this diminishes a flattering self-conception most of us hold, where we like to imagine our opinions being rooted in objective facts and reason, unlike those people over there. Most startling, perhaps, at least for those of us who write online, is the recognition of how much of this type of writing requires being completely invested in the conceit that our opinions are well-founded and, especially, that they matter. The sort of emotionally-balanced honesty that Brad is talking about, well — it sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it? Who wants to read the musings of someone who can’t even seem to take a side in an argument? As a writer, who wants to sit down every day to affirm his own ignorance and powerlessness? It’s much more viscerally satisfying to both parties to scream and throw things at those people over there. Most of what we consume online is empty-calorie junk food and cheap beer, briefly sating a fleeting desire while simultaneously stimulating the appetite for more. No one wants the equivalent of a raw-food vegan showing up and ruining the fun.

How do we maintain our independence while still remaining within touching distance of other people and events? How do we generate meaningful things to say from within ourselves, rather than rely on the trivia/outrage du jour to give us our cues? This is something I wrestle with regularly, trying to find that golden mean between “Dear Diary” self-indulgence and ephemeral social-media punditry.

Little Do They Know the Boundaries of His Wisdom In the Solitude of His Kingdom

By in solitude

Michael Finkel:

Later, a fad for hermits swept 18th-century England. It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.

The “lax in grooming” part is actually a myth. We spread that rumor ourselves to discourage dilettantes. Thankfully, I have no social obligations as part of my contract, which is good, because I have enough to read as it is, and here we have an excerpt from another book that I simply must own. Not enough hours in the day…

I Just Like Being My Own Solar System. Doing Good Things but Then Total-Eclipse Them

By in foolosophy, solitude

Emma C. Wiliams:

At primary school, I rarely played with other children. For me, playtime usually meant a walk around the edges of the playground, observing others and thinking to myself.

There were lots of reasons why I found it difficult to connect with my childhood peers, none of them particularly interesting or unusual, but I do sometimes wonder whether my early experiences have defined my temperament; I’ve never been much of a joiner, and I find many people frankly depressing.

…Experience has certainly taught me that being part of a group is not in my nature, and broadly speaking I am proud of the fact that I won’t play ball for the sake of staying on the team. It may not be my most attractive quality, but it’s the one that will drive me to raise the alarm whilst everyone else stays silent; it also makes me the kid who will shout that the emperor’s got no clothes on.

For obvious reasons, perhaps, I consider my lifelong aversion to casual companionship the most fundamentally defining feature of my personality. The most significant currents in my character, both positive and negative, trace back to this wellspring. Sometimes this trait can indeed lead to original perspectives and intellectual independence. At other times, it can make me sound like an adolescent cliché of self-regard and sour grapes, like a Pinterest image of a Nietzschean aphorism overlaying a Caspar David Friedrich painting.

The philosopher George Carlin, expanding on his predecessor Aristotle’s idea of the Golden Mean, once theorized that everyone who drives slower than you is a moron, and everyone who drives faster than you is a maniac. Both of these great men were identifying something that is probably inherent in our neurology itself. Buoyant as cork, our ability to always portray ourselves as the sane, reasonable individual surrounded by mindless fanatics can never be submerged by self-doubt. And yet, we can all look back and recognize many instances in which we were embarrassingly wrong, times when we were the morons or the maniacs, without disturbing this narrative. There have been episodes in my life where my isolato nature has given me insights that many others seem to miss. But there were also times when a wiser friend or family member could have saved me a lot of unnecessary trial and error, had I only been willing to ask questions and listen.

Like everything else, a solitary nature is neither good nor bad in itself; unfortunately, it does not present a shortcut to truth, integrity and enlightenment. Its seductive self-image may even become one more false idol to be jettisoned during the search for wisdom.

I Eat Alone, Yeah, With Nobody Else

By in books, solitude

Jesse Browner:

Nearly two thousand years ago, Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his Deipnosophistae, explicitly equated solitary eaters with criminals (“solitary eater and housebreaker!”), and just this year, the historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in Near a Thousand Tables, echoed Athenaeus’ condemnation almost word for word: “that public enemy, the solitary eater.” The fact is, eating in groups — along with speech, writing and warfare — is among the most elemental and universal expressions of humanity.

We solitary folk are truly the most oppressed people in history. If it weren’t for the fact that all we really want is to be left the fuck alone and not be press-ganged into everyone else’s idea of a good time, we would make one hell of a victim-identity group. But that would mean having to band together and interact with other people. Eh, not worth it.

(Since it seems likely that Browner will eventually see this post and think too hard about it, let me lay it out for him: Hi, Jesse. I didn’t actually read your book; my inamorata did. I just glanced through the beginning of it and read the chapter about Hitler, which was interesting. This excerpt just happened to provide the raw material for a little joke based on a couple of my recurring themes here. Best wishes.)

Leave the Spotlight, Dodge the Searchlights

By in books, calvin and hobbes, solitude

Isabel Colegate:

The celebrity hermit, a modern phenomenon, seems to escape the tolerance, let alone respect, accorded to other species of solitary, being regarded instead with indignation and outrage. The reasoning behind this must be the thought that no one would be a writer or an actor or a musician — or indeed prominent in any way — unless their chief object was to be famous, and that therefore they should lay themselves down gladly as a sacrifice on the altar of human curiosity.

Despite this observation, the index of the book shows no references to Bill Watterson, which strikes me as odd. What better example could you ask for?

In the film Dear Mr. Watterson, his mother commented on the creepiness of some fans who not only go out of their way to find out where he lives, but make it known to him that they’ve done so, like it’s a game of hide and seek. It’s like, “You have created something that provides an enduring sense of fascination for me. Now you’re obligated to stay within reach in case I ever want to indulge my curiosity further.” Even I, who respect a desire for privacy to a greater degree than most, have to admit that I would eagerly read more about Watterson the everyday guy if that information were available. Yet, I’m fully aware that doing so would almost certainly add nothing to my appreciation for Calvin and Hobbes. What drives this insatiable fascination, this urge to use someone up until they have nothing left to show or give? Why do we find it so difficult to simply allow mysteries to exist?

Stay, Stay Away

By in gender, ohferfucksake, silent moving pictures, solitude

Then the feminist ideologues came for me, and there was no one left to speak up, because I was a hermit, after all; hell, exposure to this kind of whiny drivel is probably a large reason why so many of us prefer to be left alone to begin with; I mean, Jesus Aitch, solitude is gendered now? A man who renounces everything society stands for still needs to be lectured about his oppressive privilege? Is there anything that can’t be turned into materiel for the endless war between the sexes? Fuck it; I refuse to let them take me alive.

The Hanged Man

Every Scene Is the Wrong Scene Whether I Sink or Socially Climb

By in solitude

Meng-hu:

The “pro-introvert” advice of writings like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking risks manufacturing a class of aberrant individuals with special needs. Cain herself compares introverts to women in a patriarchal world, calling introverts “second-class citizens.” But the intent to help introverts succeed in an insane world is inevitably paralleled by advice to authorities, managers, and bosses on how to best tap the skills and insights of introverts — for the former’s use.

But the mature introvert doesn’t want to succeed in an insane world, and powerful people only want to employ, direct, and socialize with others useful to themselves.

I Disappear

By in identity, solitude

Michael Finkel:

“Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person. All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home.”

…Anyone who reveals what he’s learned, Chris told me, is not by his definition a true hermit. Chris had come around on the idea of himself as a hermit, and eventually embraced it. When I mentioned Thoreau, who spent two years at Walden, Chris dismissed him with a single word: “dilettante.”

True hermits, according to Chris, do not write books, do not have friends, and do not answer questions. I asked why he didn’t at least keep a journal in the woods. Chris scoffed. “I expected to die out there. Who would read my journal? You? I’d rather take it to my grave.” The only reason he was talking to me now, he said, is because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.

“But you must have thought about things,” I said. “About your life, about the human condition.”

Chris became surprisingly introspective. “I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”

That was nice. But still, I pressed on, there must have been some grand insight revealed to him in the wild.

He returned to silence. Whether he was thinking or fuming or both, I couldn’t tell. Though he did arrive at an answer. I felt like some great mystic was about to reveal the Meaning of Life.

“Get enough sleep.”

“You’re not a real hermit!” “You’re not a real hermit!” Fellows, fellows! Surely there’s enough room in the most sparsely-populated brotherhood in existence for us all to abide each other’s idiosyncrasies without resorting to competition or excommunication! That way lies {shudder} social status!

Excellent article, at any rate. Give it a read.

Shock the Monkey to Life

By in solitude

Heidi Ledford:

Which would you prefer: pain or boredom? Given the choice, many people would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than sit idly in a room for 15 minutes, according to a study published today in Science.

The results are a testament to our discomfort with our own thoughts, say psychologists, and to the challenge we face when we try to rein them in.

“We lack a comfort in just being alone with our thoughts,” says Malia Mason, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the study. “We’re constantly looking to the external world for some sort of entertainment.”

Seriously? 15 minutes? I mean, I know this is nothing new, but still, sitting idly and letting my thoughts meander is my default state, and I’m not even into any sort of official Zen meditation or anything. I get intensely irritable when I’m forced to go too long without the opportunity. It’s a wonder I ever accomplish anything.

I Wanted to Be with You Alone and Talk About the Weather

By in socmed, solitude

Dora Zhang:

The valorization of silence and condemnation of chatter has a long philosophical tradition. “Wise men speak because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something,” Plato reportedly claimed. But taciturnity, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argues, is in many cultures a sign not just of unfriendliness but of bad character. The opposite of small talk isn’t big talk, but no talk; not meaningful conversations about the infinitude of the private man, but the potential hostility of dead air. We find the silence of others alarming rather than reassuring, Malinowski observes, and breaking silence with companionable words is the first act in establishing links of fellowship; empty pleasantries are required “to get over the strange and unpleasant tension which men feel when facing each other in silence.” In this analysis, “beautiful day out” is just the evolved form of “look, I’m putting down my machete.”

Drawing on his ethnographic field studies in Papua New Guinea, Malinowski identifies the type of language used in “free, aimless social intercourse” by the term “phatic communion.” Prevalent in “European drawing-rooms” no less than “savage tribes,” such talk takes place when a number of people sit together over a village fire at the end of a day, “or when they chat, resting from work, or when they accompany some mere manual work by gossip quite unconnected with what they are doing.” We tend to think of linguistic communication as a meaningful transmission of thoughts from a speaker to a hearer, but “inquiries about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things—all such are exchanged, not in order to inform, not in this case to connect people in action, certainly not in order to express any thought.” Instead, Malinowski suggests, the function of phatic communion touches on “one of the bedrock aspects of man’s nature in society”: our fundamental need for the presence of others, “the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company.”

Sarcastic Theo is so much more rational. Here’s to hoping society evolves more in his direction.

And We Know We Won’t Be Missing Out on Anything

By in socmed, solitude

Jacob Burak:

Welcome to FoMO (Fear of Missing Out), the latest cultural disorder that is insidiously undermining our peace of mind. FoMO, a spawn of technological advancement and proliferating social information, is the feeling that we’re missing out on something more exciting, more important, or more interesting going on somewhere else. It is the unease of feeling that others are having a more rewarding experience and we are not a part of it. According to a recent study, 56 per cent of those who use social networks suffer this modern plague.

…Freedom from other people’s opinions and release from social comparison is a triumph reserved for very few. The self-discipline strong enough to withstand the power of FoMO is no less rare. In 2012, the University of Chicago social psychologist Wilhelm Hofmann studied the use of willpower to resist daily temptation: his participants found it far easier to abstain from food and sex through willpower alone than to stay away from online networks, where the failure rate was 42 per cent.

I am here to preach the saving grace of moderate misanthropy. When you realize that most of what you read online is superfluous garbage, and that most people aren’t worth the time it takes to get to know them, this onerous burden will dissipate into nothingness like so many instantly-regretted and quickly-deleted tweets. But perhaps you weren’t fortunate enough to be born with a natural resistance to the company of others. In that case, I would recommend maximum indulgence. The only way out is straight on through the other side. Go ahead, join all the trendy social networking platforms, try to sample every empty-calorie viral story, try to be au courant with every lulzy meme. Be like a kid trying to scarf his entire bag of Halloween candy in one sitting. As you later kneel, retching into the toilet, just think of your discomfort and regret as weakness leaving the body.

Yinshih

By in bonsai minimalism, books, santutthi, solitude, work, Ω

While reading this book, I came across an anonymously sourced description of a “yinshih”, which greatly appealed to me. A quick search of the term made it clear that Alphonse Vinh must have been that very source, because his response to Andrew Rogers is nearly a word-for-word version of what I read with a few extra details, even:

You asked me what a yinshih was. Well, a yinshih means in Classical Chinese, a scholar-recluse, which is my vocation in life. Yinshihs have existed in every place and time (Walker Percy was a Southern yinshih and Joseph Joubert was a French one); but in East Asian culture, they had an honoured place at one time. Many were poets and writers. Some were mystics. Others were retired scholars who sought a quiet life of spirituality and solitude. But what they all had in common was that they had renounced the ‘red dust of the world’ and were dead to worldly ambition and desire for career success. Yinshihs renounce all this. The fortunate ones lived in the days of the Empire like many of my ancestors who could write their farewell poems to the world at age 40, “hang up their scholar’s cap”, and leave the Imperial Civil Service to take refuge on their estates or their little cottages or huts to devote themselves to contemplation, prayer, study, solitude, literature, and friendship. Very few yinshihs rejected the pleasures of poetry and wine. They did not hate the world—only its unworthy and spiritually uninteresting temptations.

In times of great societal corruption, yinshihs withdrew from society and public service in order to preserve their integrity, no matter the cost to them. Yinshihs have always been gentlemen and lovers of the life of the mind. But they care not for conventions nor do they care much for being in the right society or climbing up the slimy pole of success. They don’t care about such things because they think it’s more beautiful to sip wine whilst sitting in their hermitage as the sun sets in the fields before them. They cherish not the group so much as the individual. They are not meant for the big stage but prefer the quiet life in the shadows where it is possible to observe the stream flowing quietly beneath the waves.

Yinshihs suffer all the afflictions of humanity and sin greatly too. But it is their way to strive not to contribute to the general suffering of humanity by their own failings. Their ministry through writing and personal friendship is with the individual person whom God may send their way.

Yinshihs are happy about things that may not occur to more society-oriented people and there’s a chasm of understanding or appreciation between both sides. They do not see their way as better but simply as a reasonable, individual alternative to a group-oriented, power-driven, society-focused way of existence. Yinshihs are the first to admire that famous phrase, “A Southern Gentleman’s vocation is being and thinking.” If yinshihs have to scratch a living in the world, they will strive to do so with integrity and good will, but they will always see their livelihood as a means to live fully a yinshih life—away from the world. Yinshihs don’t know the meaning of careers. It’s meaningless to them. They care about their place within this beautiful and mysterious universe that God created, they care about worthwhile friendships and good poetry, and if they have to earn their living in the world, they feel they will have gained their right to dream in their real life after the working day is over. Yinshihs value, above all, the inner universe of the individual and the private life which they regard as most holy.

A Go-Between of Worlds

By in bonsai minimalism, books, solitude, Ω

A hermit does not threaten human society, of which he is at most the living critique.

The vagabond steals and scrounges. The rebel-of-the-moment declaims on TV. The anarchist dreams of destroying the society in which he conceals himself. Today’s hacker plots the collapse of virtual citadels in his bedroom. The anarchist tinkers with his bombs in saloons, while the hacker arms his programs at his computer, but both need the society they deplore and target for its destruction — which is their raison d’être.

The hermit stays off to one side in polite refusal, like a guest who, with a gentle gesture, declines the proffered dish. If society disappeared, the hermit would go on living as a hermit. Those in revolt against society, however, would find themselves technically out of work. The hermit does not oppose, but espouses a way of life. He seeks not to denounce a lie, but to find a truth. He is physically inoffensive and is tolerated as if he belonged to an intermediate order, a caste halfway between barbarians and civilized people. The chivalrous hero of the twelfth-century epic poem Yvain, the Knight with the Lion, driven mad by the loss of his lady love, wanders naked in a forest until he is taken in and cared for by a hermit, who restores his reason and leads him back to civilization. The hermit: a passeur, a go-between of worlds.

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