Solitude

“By my intimacy with nature, I find myself withdrawn from man.
My interest in the sun and the moon, in the morning and the evening,
compels me to solitude.” – Henry David Thoreau

I came upon a collection of poems titled “Poems about Loneliness and Solitude.” My first thought was that they shouldn’t be combined – or confused.

Poets aren’t the only people who sometimes crave solitude. I find the solitude of isolation to be a good thing occasionally and I pursue it. Loneliness is not something I pursue, but sometimes it finds me.

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
Journal of a Solitude, May Sarton

Definitions

the state of being alone,
solitary,
by oneself;
a deserted place,
aloneness but not loneliness
which is a feeling of depression
from being alone
without companions.
a place or time devoid
of human activity.
And then there is
that obsolete meaning:
A desire to be alone;
a disposition to solitude.
Not obsolete to me.

Photo: Jeswin Thomas

Hopper: The Solitude of Sunlight on the Side of a House

 

“I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward Hopper. So have other stay-at-homes, I notice online.” I often think about Hopper’s paintings, so that opening line from a article in The New Yorker did not surprise me. I don’t think Edward Hopper has been more on my since this pandemic began but I can see what might appeal to some people about his paintings right now.

The article’s author, Peter Schjeldahl, calls Hopper “the visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness.” The distinction is important in these days of isolation. Aloneness – not loneliness – is a Hopper theme.

His two most famous paintings are Nighthawks, which has been parodied many times with other people at that late-night diner, and his Early Sunday Morning cityscape empty of people street.

The article is illustrated with Hopper’s 1950 painting, Cape Cod Morning.”  I have looked at it many times. I still wonder about what that woman is looking at outside.  She’s intent. When I first saw the painting in person I thought it looked like she might be leaning on a walker. It’s probably a table, but a walker makes her longing to be outside more real to me.

People are often alone in his paintings. Their looks can be interpreted as lonely or as peaceful in their solitude.

Hopper is classified as a Realist but Schjeldahl says he is more properly a Symbolist. His work is part draftsman with lots of straight lines, but the most common comments on his paintings are about the light and shadows.  He said, “Maybe I am not very human – what I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

The New Yorker article has lots of references to influences that I don’t know – Courbet, Gericault, Burchfield – but I do get the connections to things like Hitchcock’s Bates’ home in Psycho which was influenced by Hopper’s House by the Railroad.

His landscapes don’t generally have people and, again, you might see that as solitude or loneliness, sadness or peacefulness.

Like Alfred Hitchcock’s working relationship with his wife Alma (screenwriter and film editor), Edwards’ wife, Josephine, a painter herself, also served as his model and cataloged his work.

At 83,  Hopper’s last painting was Two Comedians. It is a farewell picturing he and Jo as two pantomime comedians in the style of the commedia dell’arte taking a final bow to the public art life.  Edward died less than two years later and Jo the following year. In the end, we are all alone but hopefully not lonely.

Two Comedian, 1965

 

Speaking of Solitude

I don’t know what we will call this time one day – the Time of the Virus, The Coronavirus Pandemic, COVID-19 2020? It is a time of sheltering at home, being locked down, a time if not being alone, it is a time of solitude. Streets and stores and schools are empty.

The dictionary says that solitude is the state or situation of being alone, but the word has always seemed to mean something more than just being alone. I can’t define it, so I look to what others have said about it.

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
― Albert Einstein

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
— Gabriel , the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Solitude is fine but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine.”
― Honoré de Balzac

“If you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“My imagination functions much better when I don’t have to speak to people.”
― Patricia Highsmith

“Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”
― Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
― Audrey Hepburn

“The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.”
― Aldous Huxley

Solitude stands in the doorway
And I’m struck once again by her black silhouette
By her long cool stare and her silence
I suddenly remember each time we’ve met
— Suzanne Vega, “Solitude Standing”

“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company,  even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.”― Albert Camus

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god.”
― Aristotle

“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”
― May Sarton

How do you define solitude?

Just Another Existential Crisis

I haven’t heard the term  “existential crisis” used lately. I don’t think that is because they don’t occur any more. I suspect they occur more today than they did in earlier times.

An existential crisis is defined as a moment that an individual questions the meaning of life.

Despite having no proof to point to, I believe this questioning is as old as mankind.

Existentialism was a term that come into being in the late 19th- and 20th-century via a group of diverse European philosophers. It may seem odd that this “crisis” is attached to philosophical thinking whose predominant value is commonly acknowledged to be freedom.

Søren Kierkegaard is generally considered to have been the first existentialist philosopher, though he did not use the term existentialism. He proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it “authentically.”

I came to know the term in my teen years through literature. Reading books by Jean-Paul Sartre (such as Nausea) and works by Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, T.S. Eliot and Herman Hesse, and then reading about them, existentialism kept being referenced.

I started to see it in many things I was reading. That “crazy cliff” that Holden Caulfield wanted to save people from falling off by being a “catcher in the rye” seemed existential to me. I started to see my own life that way. I can’t imagine getting through your teen years without an existential crisis.

Existentialism came into popular use after World War II in philosophy but also in theology, drama, art, literature, and psychology.

I’m sure that when I learned about an existential crisis I thought I was going through one. Mental health hypochondria is pretty common.

An existential crisis is a moment at which an individual questions the very foundations of their life. Does life have any meaning, purpose, or value? It is commonly wrapped up in anxiety and depression.

I have a vivid memory of seeing the film The Graduate for the first time and then again in college and when Ben was floating in his parents’ pool and feeling of a lack of purpose in life, I was floating right there with him.

But a true existential crisis is big. Questioning Life means questioning relationships, decisions, and your motivations. It is an illness. A serious one.

Currently I hear the term being used on more temporary states of mind. I did some searching online and found it in an article about spending too much time on social media. It was referenced in an article about suddenly not wanting to spend time with people and wanting to be alone. I found in searching this blog that I have used “existential” in several posts.

If an existential crisis is really a moment that an individual questions the meaning of life, it doesn’t seem like ending a relationship qualifies. Or does it?

An article that I read but won’t link to suggested that some warning signs of the crisis include drinking lots of coffee and using alcohol and cigarettes as a crutch and solution instead of coffee.

Very few of us have not felt a lack of motivation, unable to be productive to the point of depression. Mental fatigue can transform into physical fatigue, which drags you down further.

Is that an existential crisis?

Or is when it when you start to think about death, talk about death and live in the shadow of death?

When I went through a bad depression (which I and my therapist never called an existential crisis) one of the signs was that I began to cry easily for not very “valid” reasons. Movies, abandoned dogs on the drive to work, leaves falling from trees, a sad-looking woman drinking coffee at a nearby table, seeing homeless people or just sitting in the car at a red light would start me off.

Obviously, someone in a real crisis needs professional help and the support of those around them. I found that one treatment known as existential-humanistic focuses on your personalized concerns for your future. It is an approach that asks about the meaning of life.

I have probably written more about solitude than loneliness and I now view solitude – that choice to be alone – as a gift.

We all have our “dark nights of the soul” but when the night carries in the daylight and for more days and nights, I think it is a crisis.

I titled this piece “Just Another Existential Crisis” not because I trivialize the term, but ironically because I think we too often toss off depressions of other people and ourselves too lightly.

When I taught Romeo and Juliet to middle school students I became very sensitive to teen suicide. Of course, I didn’t want the play to be seen as saying that suicide was a solution, but in my research I found that it is very dangerous to not take seriously teen crises. As an adult, it is easy to dismiss the end of a seventh grader’s romantic relationship that lasted only two weeks as not being anything serious. That is a mistake. It is the same mistake that the Capulets and Montagues made. Call it existential or not, a crisis is real.

Holden Caulfield may have remembered the Robert Burns poem incorrectly, but his wish to save others in the midst of his own crisis was correct.

“I thought it was ‘If a body catch a body,'” I said. “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”
– from J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye

Loneliness and Solitude

Solitude is not loneliness. Though both might be defined as that internal feeling that comes from a lack of companionship, solitude is usually a choice and may have positive benefits, while loneliness is viewed as negative and usually not a choice.

I wrote yesterday about a kind of solitude beside a pond that appears in writing as both negative and positive. Solitude can be fertile and a way to boost our creative capacity. Loneliness is empty and destructive.

Thoreau, a transcendentalist beside Walden Pond, might have viewed loneliness as a kind of depression, melancholy, or a restlessness of the soul.

Olivia Laing explores in her book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, the loneliness of being in a populated place like a  city – or being alone in a crowd.

Laing also wrote a book that talks about that beside-the-water solitude: To the River, In that more Walden-ish book, she walked from source to sea along the Ouse River where 60 years before Virginia Woolf had drowned herself. But that’s just one small bit of that Sussex river’s history.

And in another of her books (which I have not read yet), The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, I suspect solitude and loneliness both have a place.

But her discussion of this city loneliness and some of her word images, such as someone standing by a window alone at night high above the city street and people, made me think of many paintings by Edward Hopper.

Edward Hopper’s now overexposed and often parodied Nighthawks is a painting I thought of before Laing even brought it into her discussion, where she says:

There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.

That diner is a sealed chamber,”an urban aquarium, a glass cell.” Laing makes the psychological physical.

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.

Laing feels that true loneliness,is “an especially American trait (or privilege, or curse, depending on who you are)”, and one that may be best described not by words but through art. That’s an idea also found in “Loneliness Belongs to the Photographer” by Hanya Yanagihara.

“At the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

And that river talk makes me think of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It,” his novella (made into a movie too – but read the novella). I find some hopeful comfort in this retired English professor who at 70 was still “haunted by waters” and wrote this small classic.

The novella is usually collected with a few other stories and together they cover his beloved fly fishing, logging, fighting forest fires, playing cribbage, and being a husband, a son, a brother and a father. It has sold more than a million copies, so it connects with something in many people.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.”  – Norman Maclean

Several Ponds

When I think of a pond, I imagine a small lake. However, when I visit my friend’s cabin on a “pond” in Maine I see a large lake. Relativity in water sources.

I came across a book recently titled Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett which was published last year by a small press in Ireland.  Not a book organized around a narrative, it contains twenty stories most of which are also not narrative.  An odd psychological collection where we enter the narrator’s world of fragmented segments, questions and moods.

One reviewer said it was “a work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly insane.”  That name-dropping review by Jia Tolentino sets the bar high by saying that the collection “…recalls works by Knut Hamsun and Samuel Beckett, in which characters are more obviously forced into states of isolation… the cottage hymns of Katharine Tynan, the pure formal eccentricity of Emily Dickinson, and the dread-laced, detonating uncertainty of W. B. Yeats” – and that the book is a “photonegative of Walden.”

Walden Pond

Though that collection is not about ponds, it did make me think of Henry David Thoreau who will be best remembered for two years he spent beside a pond. Is Bennett’s narrator like the self-reliant Thoreau. No, though solitude plays a part in both stories, H.D. looks to find  place in the natural world and the narrator of Pond seems to be disconnecting from the world.

Henry David Thoreau lived on the shore of a pond for two years starting in the summer of 1845 and eventually wrote about it in Walden; or, Life in the Woods. In that small piece of woods that he made famous (land owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson) Thoreau unintentionally sparked a respect for nature and more than a few people on an environmental path.

His pond was Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts which is a kettle hole formed by retreating glaciers 10,000–12,000 years ago. As I have written earlier about Thoreau and Walden Pond, many people often imagine his life there as one of a hermit, he was actually quite social with regular visitors. I was very surprised and amused to learn long after I first read the book that he made frequent visits into town and to his nearby family home to get some of his mom’s cookies.

But he did isolate himself from society with the intention to write about it with greater objectivity. His experiment in simple living and self-sufficiency wasn’t one of survival and wilderness, though compared to the majority of us living today it seems to be a very radical undertaking.