Seeking Solitude

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


Even though I am a teacher, an inherently social profession, I am not an especially social person. I can be social, but I am not social. I have social skills, but I do not enjoy having to mobilize and deploy them. It does not come easy to me, as it did not to my father. I am my father’s son—the father I once vowed to be different from but now, older, find I am the same as, right down to voice inflections, handwriting, and body language. Who knew my father was like a werewolf, lurking inside me, dormant, hidden, deep as marrow, waiting only for the full moon of my advancing years to leap to ferocious life? Is that the reason I solicit solitude? A genetics of solitude? Some recessive allele, its biological alarm clock sounding, that has sprung awake? Or is it some synaptic shift or neurotransmitter imbalance brought on by advancing age? Is it some combination of these? Something else? I don’t know. What I do know is I find myself, as did Thoreau, companioned best by being uncompanioned “the greater part of the time.”

Don’t misunderstand. I am not arrogant. I am not indentured to myself. I feel no self-absorbed sense of entitlement, no lofty disdain for others. I do not consider myself the sweet spot of the universe. I do not gaze longingly in the self-reflecting pool. I adore my wife, cherish my son and daughter-in-law, and delight in my grandkids. I am, without fail, answerable to my obligations to friends, colleagues, employer, and community. I am socially encumbered. I accept that, understand that. I do not demand that the world speak in my accent.

I believe in the outward reaching virtues--courage, compassion, truth, loyalty, duty, self-command, commitment, charity—and hate that they have often been kneaded by the internalizing dictates of a New Age-overlay into personal mandates for individual growth: your first duty is to yourself, feel compassion for yourself, be loyal to yourself, commit to yourself. Burn incense and light votive candles to yourself. Sing a thousand silvered hosannahs to yourself. Re-enchant yourself. It’s Me O’Clock. And thus does the self shrink to the size of a Post-It, with room enough left to print The Odyssey. I believe dream-deep that such a self-regard feloniously assaults the soul, a version of which I also believe in.

And yet, I find it wholesome to be a onesome, to be off the social grid. To withdraw the greater part of the time. I think I agree with the speaker in Robert Frost’s “Into My Own,” who, having entered a woods, determines to keep on going:

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew —
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

That, for me, is the affirmative summons of solitude: to be “more sure of all I thought was true.” It’s a matter of learning, and coming to trust, the motions of your mind.

I have long since stopped attending parties, dinners, get-togethers of any sort. I am quiet by nature. I do not spend words lavishly. I prefer to listen, to heed Polonius’s advice to young Laertes in Hamlet: “give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.” My reticence to speak is sometimes misinterpreted, and I’m considered aloof, disdainfully uninvolved. I am, in fact, neither of those things. I simply lack the verbal qualities required by the social affairs I used to attend. I am not glib. I cannot be witty on demand. I hate talking smack. I do not long to hear my echo in the world. I do not speak unless I have something to say that will advance a discussion or contribute an idea that isn’t well past its expiration date.

I found these social affairs marked by a narrowing of discourse and governed by rules I did not know and, ultimately, felt no interest in fathoming. A sort of status quo sensibility reigned, a smartly uniformed uniformity of opinion that pushed contrarian ideas into silence. A cocoon of reinforced certitudes. Saltine crackers of thought gone soggy sitting in the pantry. I struggled with conversation, always, inevitably, knocked outside myself, casting about anxiously for the next thing to say, something, anything, to meet my dialogic obligation. Language does more than declare, question, command, and exclaim. It gives pleasure, or it should, anyway. Finding little of that in these social functions, I gradually withdrew. Sought solitude.

Possibly this is a failure on my part. Perhaps I’m simply lazy and self-indulgent. Perhaps my desire to seek aloneness masks a raging individualism, a sidewise impassivity to the gregariousness we are supposed to inherently possess. Perhaps I’m genetically maladapted, lacking the energy-generating mitochondria necessary for social engagement—some stray strand of DNA having eluded the vigilant evolutionary police. Certainly, inwardness receives little social encouragement. It “don’t seem natural,” as Huck would say. It does not seem to me, though, that I have violated some social covenant. I have not foresworn social being. I am not cloistered. I am not a hermit living in a tree. I can be social, am social on a daily basis. I want only to withdraw for a while, carve out of social space a loophole of retreat where I can read, write, ruminate, deliberate, imagine, analyze, remember, assess, question; where I can confront my thoughts, even impulse-imbued prethoughts; where consciousness is palpable, and I experience most authentically who and what and why and how I am. I want to practice willed attention, if only for a while; to seek rather than be sought.

I do not stand in opposition to society. I seek only a private space within it. The kind of binary thinking that opposes solitude to sociality has a long pedigree in Western culture. It needs to be deconstructed. Emerson tells us that to descend into one’s own mind is to descend “into the secrets of all minds.” The felt intersubjectivity of the inner life, he suggests, draws us upward and outward; it is, finally, a social solidarity. Even Thoreau entertained visitors at Walden, and several times a week walked to Concord to dine with acquaintances. But, like Thoreau, I find solitude companionable “the greater part of the time”. The word “companion” derives from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread). A companion, then, is, etymologically speaking, someone with whom you share bread, nourishment. Solitude is my bread fellow.