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I had as lief have been myself alone

I must be careful expressing a desire for solitude, and even more so for extolling its virtues to a society that values membership and not outliers. Privilege is bestowed on those who belong; rights are withheld from those who choose to watch from its edge. Solitude, it would seem, is suspicious, dangerous. I would hope I am neither.

In enjoying my frequent need for being alone (not lonely, you understand) I think I am in good company. Hannah Arendt, a German Jewish historian who fled to the USA in 1941 from Nazi-occupied Europe, studied the relationship of the individual and society. In 1961, she was commissioned by The New Yorker to report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust.

And why is Eichmann important in this discussion?[i] ‘She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder… Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the vita contemplativa, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.’

Arendt believed that ‘freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the vita contemplativa – and the public, political sphere – the vita activa. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.’

Not to get bogged down in Arendt’s philosophy, consider Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief that ‘In the morning, – solitude’ so that ‘nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible’; I think we do solitude a grave disservice in linking it to loneliness, or worse, to some form of illness.

Some of us actually enjoy being by ourselves -not habitually, and not because we are shy in the company of others we don’t know, but because the enjoyment of a sunset, or a few bars of a Brahms quartet, is a feeling I have; I don’t need to canvas your opinion to inform me of what I feel.

Solitude is, in many ways, a similar experience: subjective and valuable. Remember Plato’s analogy of the Cave, where one person who, with others, had been confined in a cave so they could only see the shadows projected on the wall in front of them; shadows were their only reality. Then that one person escaped the cave and wandered into the fullness of the sun outside. There are various versions of what happened next, but I prefer the version of him running back into the cave to tell the others what he saw, only to be mocked and derided for lying to them. But, no matter the arguments to the contrary, it was he who experienced the epiphany, not them… That’s what solitude provides for some of us I think…

It sometimes happens to me when I am on a park bench watching the branches sway in the wind, or on the seawall entranced by the endless pattern of waves fighting each other to make it to the shore. Like them I am temporarily attempting to lose the crowd; unlike them, I do not necessarily have a goal in mind, however.

The other day as I sat beside a drying creek and staring at its timid water hesitating at the roiling ocean’s edge, I let them both dilute the cares of my day. I noticed there was a family nearby and some children were throwing a ball for their dog to fetch. As luck would have it, the ball, the dog, and eventually a barefooted little boy in blue short pants and a red tee shirt ended up near my feet. I reached down and handed the ball back to him to throw.

“Why are you just sitting here, mister?” he shouted over the roar of a wave crashing against the stone breakwater.

I smiled, then shrugged and pretended I hadn’t heard him.

Not to be put off, though the little tyke stood his ground, tilted his head to one side out of unanswered curiosity, and asked me again. “Why are you sitting here all by yourself…” He thought about it for a moment, and then with the random curiosity of a four year old, he asked if I had a dog.

I shook my head. “No, but you’re having so much fun with yours, it makes me wish I had one too.”

He smiled, and brushed his curly brown hair off his face with dirty little hands. “I could ask my dad if you could borrow my dog,” he said with the innocence of childhood.

“I don’t think pets are allowed where I live,” I said with an exaggerated shrug.

The little boy thought about it for a while and then his face brightened with a sudden thought. “That’s okay, mister. I don’t think my dad would mind if you just watched us play with Jango.” He blinked. “Jango’s the name of my dog… And on weekends we come here to play all the time!”

He was so happy he’d helped me out that for a while he didn’t noticed his father waving at him. “Well I have to go now, but I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said, running with Jango to catch up with his father.

Sometimes even solitude needs a short break. It reminded me of part of a poem by Kahlil Gibran: The River Cannot Go Back

The river can not go back.
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk
of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear,
because that’s where the river will know
it’s not about disappearing into the ocean,
but of becoming the ocean.

And yet, unlike the river, I have chance to rethink things: I can go back; but can also return…

[i] https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone

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