solitude

I’m Very Ape and Very Nice

By in macho macho men, solitude, Ω

Simon Pegg:

Masculinity reached a certain point in film where it became so ridiculous that it couldn’t go any further. Arnold Schwarzenegger was the perfect male in the “Terminator” pictures, in that he was made of metal and he was super-built. What happened then is that masculinity sort of got chipped away until you had a character like John McClane in “Die Hard”, who was slightly more vulnerable and, as such, imperfect. That was almost the beginning of dismantling the super-male into something more normal. Through that process, what used to be the Beta male became the Alpha male. You’ve got people like Seth Rogen, I guess myself, and Steve Carell and Paul Rudd—all slightly more normal guys that are taking the lead roles because it’s okay now to be imperfect and nerdy.

Okay, dismantling boneheaded machismo is fine and all, but I’m still staking out the Omega Male territory for myself and putting up a barbed-wire fence and a crocodile-infested moat. Not every outcast is hungering for acceptance and respectability.

Oh Henry

By in solitude, writing

Paris Review:

…What’s your take on the romantic notion of the artist in isolation? Is a Henry David Thoreau laughable in this day and age? —Kate
Of course writers need solitude—that’s where the writing happens—but I’m with MacLeish: if you’re going to have anything worth saying, you’d better start by taking an interest in other people. That means living among them; sexting doesn’t count. The two big dangers for contemporary fiction, it seems to me, are people not reading enough and people not hanging out enough. These dangers were unimaginable in Thoreau’s time. His solitude is full of remembered texts and remembered conversations. His clean slate is a palimpsest. But to spend your days alone and online isn’t just bad training, it also makes for lousy material.
References to my “Thoreau-esque” existence have become a bit of a running joke between me and a couple friends. I always feign annoyance at being compared to a poser when it comes to being a hermit, quoting Edward Abbey in response:

Henry was no hermit. Hardly even a recluse. His celebrated cabin at Walden Pond – some of his neighbors called it a “shanty” – was two miles from Concord Common. A half-hour walk from pond to post office. Henry lived in it for only two years and two months. He had frequent human visitors, sometimes too many, he complained, and admitted that his daily rambles took him almost every day into Concord. When he tired of his own cooking and his own companionship he was always welcome at the Emersons’ for a free dinner.

So, yeah, what’s “laughable” is the fact that Hank is still an eponym for austere isolation (the virtues of his prose aside). I live three miles from town! I’ve been in this house in the woods for four years so far! I can count the number of friends I’ve had visit me here on one hand with fingers left over! And I’ve only left the house once since last Tuesday! Where’s my recognition?

The Fire Within Us

By in foolosophy, moralizing, nietzsche, psychology, solitude, the madness of crowds

Scientists now know that, while introverts have no special advantage in intelligence, they do seem to process more information than others in any given situation. To digest it, they do best in quiet environments, interacting one on one. Further, their brains are less dependent on external stimuli and rewards to feel good.
As a result, introverts are not driven to seek big hits of positive emotional arousal—they’d rather find meaning than bliss—making them relatively immune to the search for happiness that permeates contemporary American culture. In fact, the cultural emphasis on happiness may actually threaten their mental health. As American life becomes increasingly competitive and aggressive, to say nothing of blindingly fast, the pressures to produce on demand, be a team player, and make snap decisions cut introverts off from their inner power source, leaving them stressed and depleted. Introverts today face one overarching challenge—not to feel like misfits in their own culture.
On the surface, introversion looks a lot like shyness. Both limit social interaction, but for differing reasons. The shy want desperately to connect but find socializing difficult, says Bernardo J. Carducci, professor of psychology and director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. Introverts seek time alone because they want time alone. An introvert and a shy person might be standing against the wall at a party, but the introvert prefers to be there, while the shy individual feels she has no choice.
But extensive internal dialogue, especially in response to negative experiences, can set off a downward spiral of affect. And indeed, anxiety and depression are more common among introverts than extraverts. In general, says Robert McPeek, director of research at the Center for Applications of Psychological Type, introverts are more self-critical than others—but also more realistic in their self-assessments. Call it depressive realism.
In the united states, people rank happiness as their most important goal. That view has a special impact on introverts. Happiness is not always their top priority; they don’t need external rewards to keep their brains in high gear. In fact, the pursuit of happiness may represent another personality-culture clash for them.
There’s really too many good parts to excerpt them all, but those are some of my favorites. I wish that phrase “A Pathway to Success?” didn’t appear up there, though. I don’t want “success” as conventionally defined. That’s a large part of what being introverted means to me. I don’t want what you want. I don’t feel like you feel. I just want to be left alone to do my own thing with the few people whose company truly adds something to my life besides distraction and chatter.
The more we think about all that has been and will be, the paler grows that which is. If we live with the dead and die with them in their death, what are our ‘neighbors’ to us then? We grow more solitary, and we do so because the whole flood of humanity is surging around us. The fire within us, which is for all that is human, grows brighter and brighter – and that is why we gaze upon that which immediately surrounds us as though it had grown more shadowy and we had grown more indifferent to it. But the coldness of our glance gives offense!
– Nietzsche
I don’t feel limited by introversion and haven’t since I was a teenager; I take a perverse pride in being a taciturn square peg in round social holes. But one interesting thing I’ve noticed is that you still have to beware of the way in which social convention can embolden people to try to bully those who are understood to be deficient by society’s standards in some way.
My brother, as I’ve said before, is one of the most negative complainers I know. Always looking for something to gripe about, always looking for a chance to take a sneering cheap shot at someone else, especially when they aren’t around to defend themselves. And yet, he is as convinced that I’m the one with an attitude problem as he is that the sun rises in the east. I stand in a room, rarely saying a word to anyone, just doing my task and moving along so I can go home and spend time doing the things I love. He comes in with his mouth already running and starts right in with his pissant remarks. I try to appeal to reason and ask him: which type of person would you rather be around in general? It’s to no avail. He’s absorbed it from the cultural atmosphere, the idea that people who don’t go out of their way to fill the air with their voice are deserving of contempt, mockery and abuse. No one ever had to tell him explicitly, it’s just an unspoken understanding that anyone who deviates from some mythical golden mean of personality type (or body type, or sexual habits, or entertainment preferences, etc.) is fair game. It may be senseless and unfair and irrational, but stupid people in large groups are still a powerful force to be reckoned with, and they will often try to destroy you, sometimes just for their sheer thoughtless amusement.

Sitting Alone with a Book on My Own

By in foolosophy, psychology, solitude

Leon Neyfakh:

In a world gone wild for wikis and interdisciplinary collaboration, those who prefer solitude and private noodling are seen as eccentric at best and defective at worst, and are often presumed to be suffering from social anxiety, boredom, and alienation.
But an emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking. There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them. Just as regular exercise and healthy eating make our minds and bodies work better, solitude experts say, so can being alone.
Hey. HEY. HEY. Some of us don’t want to be seen as normal. Some of us don’t see solitude as akin to power naps, something to make our worker-drone lives even more productive. Some of us would like to preserve solitude as the domain of the eccentric, the socially anxious, and the slightly mad outcasts to keep it from becoming trendy and overrun by day-trippers and weekend warriors looking for an ultra-compact “40 days in the desert” experience that doesn’t require turning off their cellphone. At any rate, this mountaintop is taken. Fuck off.

In Your Eyes

By in foolosophy, philosophy, solitude

For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.

– Rilke

I’ve never found Descartes terribly interesting, but I read something last night that I liked: in a letter to his friend Marin Mersenne, he mentioned having begun trying to live his life under the motto, “To live well, you must live unseen.” Of course, having seen the persecution of Galileo and the burning at the stake of more than a few philosophers and heretics, he could have very well meant that to live at all, you must avoid the wrathful attention of the Church. But still, my thought was wow, how very Taoist of him!

The people of the world excitedly run about as if they were going to miss the yearly, royal, sacrificial feast, or as if they were going to be the last one to climb a high tower on a beautiful spring day.
I alone remain quiet and indifferent.
I anchor my being to that which existed before Heaven and Earth were formed.
I alone am innocent and unknowing, like a newborn babe.
Unoccupied by worldly cares, I move forward to nowhere.
The people of the world have more than enough.
I alone appear to have nothing.
The people of the world appear shrewd and wise.
I alone look foolish.
I like to be forgotten by the world and left alone.
It also occurred to me that his motto was a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to get at in this post. Being “seen” can be a description of the ways in which our identities are fixed and reinforced in the sight of others. For people who think of philosophy not as scholarly hair-splitting over the ultimate nature of things, but as the search for how to live well, how to best pursue truth and integrity, the weight and pressure of other people’s attention can be a hindrance, trapping us in egotistic responses to their expectations.

I Watch It All Through My Mirrored Shades

By in prying eyes, science, solitude

See yourself in my shades
You’ll never know if I’m looking the other way
– Animal Bag

One of the major deficits of autism is the lack of eye contact. “If patients with autism are talking to you, not only do they not look at your face, they may even turn their face in the other direction to avoid any contact,” said Dr. Sirigu.

In addition to the unusual memory that I mentioned recently, one of the things that made me wonder if I might be somewhere on the mild end of the autism spectrum was the fact that I’ve never been able to maintain eye contact. Even among people I’ve known for years, it’s all I can do to make occasional glances to their eyes. It’s a feeling akin to trying to stare into a searchlight. In fact, the only time I can make sustained eye contact is when I’m not the one talking, and even then, I can only do it by essentially vacating my head, sort of like when you’re daydreaming, and your eyes are fixed on a certain spot without you being conscious of what you’re looking at. So I’m afraid partners in face-to-face conversation have to choose between me not looking at them or not really hearing them. Sorry, y’all.
But long before I ever heard that there could be a biological reason for it, I had been intrigued by reading that some cultures made a virtue out of not staring in someone’s face. Tony Hillerman in Skinwalkers:
Janet Pete was studying Chee’s face. It was a habit that Chee had learned slowly, and come to tolerate slowly, and that still sometimes made him uneasy. Another of those cultural differences that Mary found odd and exotic.
(“That first month or so in class I was always saying: ‘Look at me when I talk to you,’ and the kids simply wouldn’t do it. They would always look at their hands, or the blackboard, or anywhere except looking me in the face. And finally one of the other teachers told me it was a cultural thing. They should warn us about things like that. Odd things. It makes the children seem evasive, deceptive.” And Chee had said something about it not seeming odd or evasive to him. It seemed merely polite. Only the rude peered into one’s face during a conversation…)
Janet Pete was reading his nonverbal signals. Rude, Chee thought. No wonder Navajos rated it as bad manners. It invaded the individual’s privacy.
Makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I’m a long-lost Navajo. But as long as I’m stranded here among the belegana, forced to rely on dark or mirrored sunglasses to ward off prying eyes, I have to wonder why it is that humans don’t have the natural aversion to prolonged eye contact that so many other animals do. Is this a particular cultural value that somehow got normalized by Westerners? I’ve never seen any studies that approached the topic from this angle.

Natural Joe

By in environment, foolosophy, solitude, waiting for the barbarians

A few people have urged me at times to check out Joe Bageant’s writing. I’ve tried on a few different occasions to dip into it, but I always leave feeling positively underwhelmed, like I’ve just spent time listening to a more affable, less curmudgeonly James Howard Kunstler. It’s not that I even disagree with much of what he has to say, it’s just that I find myself spacing out in the middle of a paragraph, lulled into a daze by the sense that I’ve heard all this countless times before. To wit:

The uniformity on Planet Norte is striking. Each person is a unit, installed in life support boxes in the suburbs and cities; all are fed, clothed by the same closed-loop corporate industrial system. Everywhere you look, inhabitants are plugged in at the brainstem to screens downloading their state approved daily consciousness updates. iPods, Blackberries, notebook computers, monitors in cubicles, and the ubiquitous TV screens in lobbies, bars, waiting rooms, even in taxicabs, mentally knead the public brain and condition its reactions to non-Americaness. Which may be defined as anything that does not come from of Washington, DC, Microsoft or Wal-Mart.

Yes, yes, we know, modern Western life is sterile, plastic, inauthentic, soulless, dark Satanic Mills, etc. Fill in the blank with your favorite ad-libs. It just strikes me as a composite of the same facile romantic critiques we’ve heard since, well, the Romantics. And aside from hardcore examples like Ted Kaczynski, hearing this sort of complaint from Westerners, even those who have expatriated themselves to a Mexican village, puts me in mind of something Edward Abbey wrote about Henry David Thoreau:

Henry was no hermit. Hardly even a recluse. His celebrated cabin at Walden Pond – some of his neighbors called it a “shanty” – was two miles from Concord Common. A half-hour walk from pond to post office. Henry lived in it for only two years and two months. He had frequent human visitors, sometimes too many, he complained, and admitted that his daily rambles took him almost every day into Concord. When he tired of his own cooking and his own companionship he was always welcome at the Emersons’ for a free dinner.

I’m not interested in hairsplitting debates over personal integrity vs. hypocrisy here; I’m just noting that there aren’t many people lining up to defiantly hand back their membership in Western Civilization in order to go native; most of them, despite all their bluster, seem to feel that the problem is just that there’s “too much” of our resource-devouring high-tech world, that there has to be some compromise, some way we can still have these things without guilt, perhaps if we just each reduce our personal consumption by some arbitrary percentage. And yet, and yet…everywhere I look, I see more houses being built, more cars being sold, and almost all my fellow thirty-somethings have babies on the way or a few toddlers underfoot. But who dares suggest that maybe the problem is that there’s just too many people, full stop? And what would we do about it even if we admitted that?
Look. Our Western consumer lifestyle is unsustainable in the long term. Most of us agree on this. It most certainly cannot be extended to the other several billion people on Earth. But there never was any Garden of Eden. We didn’t accidentally trap ourselves in a labyrinthine dystopia, we created it, step by step, as a way of escaping the drudgery of life in pre-modern villages. A whole bunch of those people unfortunate enough to be born somewhere impoverished couldn’t give a blistered fuck about Western notions of false consciousness or ecological disaster; they’d be happy to take a chance on suffering ennui with the rest of us if it meant they could have air conditioning, refrigerators, televisions and their own cars, even if only for a little while. Contentedness is not our natural condition, and it’s not exclusive to any particular way of life. Very few people manage to carry a sense of it around with them, wherever they happen to be. The rest of us project it somewhere else and continue the endless chase.

Either a Beast or a God

By in environment, foolosophy, solitude

But the really reckless were fetched by an older, colder voice, the oceanic whisper: “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing. That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; there are only the various envies, all of them sad.”

— W.H. Auden

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle

From the NYT:

The compulsion to live in isolation can be attributed to any number of factors, said Elaine N. Aron, a psychologist and the author of “The Undervalued Self” and “The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.”

Some people might “really need their downtime,” Dr. Aron said, and seek out “isolation that avoids all social intercourse.” Others may have developed an “avoidant attachment style” in childhood, resulting in “a need to prove to themselves that they don’t need anybody,” she said.

For many people, though, the desire for extreme solitude may have simpler roots, she noted: “It could be because they want a mystical experience. You can’t pathologize that.”

O RLLY? That’s funny; I would turn that completely around. I can understand and be sympathetic to someone who has had enough of the bitter dregs of intimate relationships and decided that the negatives outweigh the positives. While I think there are many degrees and shades of difference worth exploring between an active social life and utter solitude, I don’t think it’s completely strange to prefer your own company to an extreme degree.

But as for going off into the wilderness, miles from any other human, in order to find some mystical secret or meaning in life, man, you gotta be one non compos mentis motherfucker. “Meaning” is a human construction. Even the examples of the bitter and the brokenhearted stand as a reaction to social relationships, the photo negative of social engagement. They’re still defined by what they oppose. Caspar David Friedrich paintings notwithstanding, wild nature isn’t going to reveal anything profound to you about how you should spend your life. Fight, feast, fuck, and eventually die. That’s about it. If you want more nuance than that, you’re going to have to look to human society.

The Oceanic Whisper

By in art, books, foolosophy, music, nietzsche, poetry, socmed, solitude

The more we think about all that has been and will be, the paler grows that which is. If we live with the dead and die with them in their death, what are our ‘neighbors’ to us then? We grow more solitary, and we do so because the whole flood of humanity is surging around us. The fire within us, which is for all that is human, grows brighter and brighter – and that is why we gaze upon that which immediately surrounds us as though it had grown more shadowy and we had grown more indifferent to it. But the coldness of our glance gives offense!

Behavior that is excited, noisy, inconsistent, nervous constitutes the antithesis of great passion: the latter, dwelling within like a dark fire and there assembling all that is hot and ardent, leaves a man looking outwardly cold and indifferent and impresses upon his features a certain impassivity. Such men are, to be sure, occasionally capable of neighbor love – but it is a kind different from that of the sociable and anxious to please: it is a gentle, reflective, relaxed friendliness; it is though they were gazing out of the windows of their castle, which is their fortress and for that reason also their prison – to gaze into what is strange and free, into what is different, does them so much good!

— Nietzsche

But the really reckless were fetched by an older, colder voice, the oceanic whisper: “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing. That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; there are only the various envies, all of them sad.”

— W.H. Auden

Cool article. My favorite part:

“Solitude is a healthy way of being alone with oneself. One engages in an inner dialogue,” Dumm says. “One of the things that our culture really tries to discourage is thinking, reflection, seriousness. I think that we have to have more confidence in our ability to be thoughtful people. We spend an enormous amount of time worrying about ourselves, but not an awful lot of time caring for ourselves. Caring for ourselves means thinking very seriously and carefully about the conditions under which we’re living our lives, and how others are living theirs, and taking instruction from the way that others have lived their lives.”

The part I would take issue with:

While technology has given us all sorts of novel ways to connect and stay in touch — from Facebook to texting to Twitter — Cacioppo contends that such digital communications are great if they facilitate and enhance face-to-face interactions, but they can increase feelings of loneliness if they are a substitution for in-person interaction. He compares online communication as a balm to loneliness to eating celery when you’re hungry; it’s food, but it’s not going to fill you up like a nutritious meal.

I’ve always been a solitary person, content to spend hours or even days alone with only superficial social contact, and I’ve never considered it a problem. Others have, as I’ve been accused of being everything from rude to mute to mentally retarded for my tendency to speak very little to strangers or mild acquaintances, and then only when spoken to. I have very little ability or patience for meaningless small talk, and wish other people didn’t feel the need to drown out the sound of the wind whistling through their heads by jabbering about nothing in particular. I am definitely one of those who most often feels “lonely” in a crowd or a social gathering where I don’t really have time or freedom to be alone with my thoughts. I don’t know whether it’s a question of being overly cerebral or intellectual (not in the “good lord, I sure am a genius” sense, but in the sense of being analytical and dispassionate) or perhaps some genetic factors, but it is as close to being an essential part of my being as I think a person can have. Personally, the Internet (and especially the blogs) has been a godsend for a social misfit like me. I suppose I would be considered by Cacioppo to be one of those who use it as a substitute for face-to-face interaction, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve found just as much, if not even more intellectual stimulation and interesting characters online in the last several years than I have in the previous few decades of real life. I feel just as much affection for Roy Edroso, Scott & S.Z. Heywood J. and IOZ as people I encounter in the course of a day; maybe in a different way, but no less meaningful. I wouldn’t claim that I “know” people I interact with on the blogs in the same way that I would in person, but who cares? This sort of medium allows you to distill the most interesting parts of what people are all about, their better essence, without the dross that makes up much of their lives. I don’t “know” the artists whose work I treasure either, but my life is no less enriched just because I haven’t seen them sitting around in their underwear scratching themselves. In fact, that might lessen the effect they’ve had on me, might diminish some of the magic. I don’t doubt that for most people, they need to regularly see a smiling face or feel a warm body near theirs to feel well-adjusted, but I’ll take passionate written exchanges of ideas over up-close-and-personal yammering about the weather any day and feel completely satisfied.

“When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient court, of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them.”

— Machiavelli

Speaking of art…I’ve been single for the last few years, and long ago passed the grace period where people left you alone out of respect for a recently failed long-term relationship. Now I get hints from everyone from my mom to my friends, who ask if I’m dating again, who was that girl they saw me talking to, don’t I get lonely around this time of year, and so on. It’s a shame that thanks to centuries of moping Romantics, the epigones of Young Werther disingenuously turning all the best reasons for being a lone wolf into hackneyed clichés, nothing I could say won’t sound like sour grapes or desperate posing or overcompensating. But the truth is, I realized some time ago that music is what makes me happier than anything on earth, with literature a close second. The most transcendent moments I’ve ever experienced have been in the grip of a song or a beautiful passage in a book. I know what it’s like to be in romantic love, of course, and I’ve had moments in a relationship where I felt very happy and content, but still, that sublime sense of dissolving in something much bigger than my tiny ego, of almost existing temporarily somewhere beyond space and time – that belongs to art. Perhaps for all the pleasure Nietzsche has given me with his grandiose, bombastic literary style and quirky insights into the nooks and crannies of life that make me laugh at the discovery of things I never would have thought of on my own, I’m moving more towards a Schopenhauerish view of life, to escape the horrors of the world via the contemplation of art. (I haven’t thrown any talkative old ladies down a flight of stairs yet, but there’s still plenty of time for that.)

So, yes – I might be the only person bounded in the nutshell of my house on Christmas Day, but as long as I have a rack full of CDs and shelves full of books, I will count myself a king of infinite space.

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