I wrote a friend recently that I was having January feelings—those feelings of suspension that come with the new year, of measured normalcy returning, in whatever form that takes. The cold and wintry landscape showing little sign of differentiation from day to day, despite the logic of knowing that we are gaining daylight with each day towards equinox. Still, it feels suspended, held up, unable to exactly rest or turn towards the next thing. The pause of the year, struggling to get its feet under it still, wobbly and feeling like it would rather rest until it can try again.
Pause: “a word of uncertain etymology with no certain cognates outside Greek…”
In a way that’s exactly what it feels like—that sort of middling feeling of in-between, of something without reference to measure by. The year’s hesitation with a bit of doubt and uncertainty.
There’s something about that sense of pause that I enjoy—a type of recognition for what it feels like to stop before uncertainty. The year is uncertain at this point, despite having an assigned number, so why not pause a bit to gauge the weather, the horizon, the layout of the terrain before making a decision on direction? Maybe it’s a way to sit with uncertainty for a bit, allow it to be a part of the days—Keats’ famous idea of negative capability, of “being in uncertainty, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” Conviction is overrated.
I’ve also been feeling solitary—heck, I feel solitary most days because I’ve crafted my life around that need and comfort with being alone, to write—and so I’ve been reading a lot about solitude. Of how it allows space to not have to perform, to not be on, to find our own rhythms, likes, desires. The freedom of that—and how so much of what we are schooled, admonished, and told to do grinds away at any sense of freedom. Committing crimes against ourselves, as Alice Koller writes in Stations of Solitude.
I hadn’t heard of Koller until recently—I can’t remember how I stumbled across her work—but devoured her very idiosyncratic, intellectualized sense of becoming herself as a writer and philosopher. After spending three months on her own in Nantucket, after a string of failed attempts at academic work, she lived on her own ever after in the country, with her dogs, importantly.
She writes about it all with precision, wit, egotism, and too much fervor and detail at times. But I appreciate the way she writes about being alone as having an intimacy with all that is around her—just not human. When we center humanity as superior, separate from everything around us that we deem ‘wild’ or ‘nature,’ we ignore that we are never truly alone—it’s impossible to be if we are on this earth. Koller writes
‘Alone’ is not the correct word. It is a short way of saying something else. The long way, the accurate thing to say, is that I lived with no other human beings in my household.1
She writes of her surroundings as becoming a part of her, of being in company with:
After two years of unimpeded access to that privacy I came to feel that the outer boundaries of my self approached that unmarked perimeter of [the] woods, that my being had indeterminate margins extending far beyond the surface of the epidermal layer that the eyes of other human beings saw when they looked at me.2
The intimacy she cultivated, with her dogs, her surrounding wherever she could best find, she writes of as a form of loving—and it’s that sense of loving and knowing what’s around you, with you, that I found myself marking over and over:
I wanted to have forever the whole of it: song, color, ambience. And an essential ingredient of the whole of it was my loving it. I do not write about my loving it: my writing it is my loving it.3
I was also reading a used copy of Koller’s book, where a previous owner had underlined nearly every salient point or sentence that I also underlined or marked. I’ve come to love this about used books—the connection with previous readers, their own notes to themselves becoming a dialogue with my own thoughts. It’s a type of connection that surprises and comforts, to know intimately that another has read and appreciated similar ideas.
Etymology tells me that the word alone is a "
contraction of all ane, from Old English all ana “unaccompanied, all by oneself,” literally “wholly oneself,” from all “all, wholly” + an “one." It preserves the old pronunciation of one.
Reading that, I was reminded that the word whole is also akin to holy, meaning to heal, make whole. Wholly one’s self, healed, whole. Not only alone, but all one.
One of the first book-length studies of solitude was written by Johann Georg Zimmerman in 1785. I have a copy of it on my bookshelf—it was a popular book in its time, and relatively easy to find copies of in a vintage bookshop. While it is critical of solitude on some levels, it acknowledged how vital it is to understanding one’s self, of needing time to think, for reflection. Yet Zimmerman was steeped in Enlightenment ideals—of a belief that human nature was social, that solitude should only be a temporary event, a pause. The idea of continued solitude was becoming pathologized, dismissed as the extremes of mental illness or worse, ascetic religious practices that led to zealotry, all of which were sources of great anxiety in the age of reason.
To the extent that Zimmerman did not uphold enlightenment ideals enough, John Evelyn (1620-1706) published a refute to such ideas of solitude, Publick Employment and an Active Life Prefer’d to Solitude, where he writes:
those who either know the value of themselves, or their implements, may find useful entertainments, without retiring into Wildernesses, immuring themselves, renouncing the World, and deserting publick affairs…For, believe it Sir, the Wisest men are not made in Chambers and Closets crowded with shelves; but by habitudes and active Conversations.
What is embedded in such sentiments is also a distinctly gendered idea of public and private life—where women of the nineteenth century were relegated to chambers, closets certainly, and if lucky, homes crowded with a few shelves. Women at the time such debates were circling had no recourse to a public life—and such arguments reinforced the reasons why women are to be considered as stunted creatures, consigned to a life of solitude at home. Evelyn concludes nearly saying as much:
Solitude produces ignorance, renders us barbarous, feeds revenge, disposes to envy, creates Witches, dispeoples the World, renders it a desart, and would soon dissolve it.4
Of course solitude would be culpable for producing witches—a legacy of so many widows, with a living of their own, accused of being a witch.
And so I can’t help but feel that there is, in any debate about being in company or finding our own freedom in solitude, a fear that economies, nations, would all screech to a non-money-making halt should people have time to withdraw, reflect, and—gasp—make choices for themselves, outside the dictates of society. Not unlike the choice for a woman to have bodily autonomy and healthcare. Those who have power in society want to keep it—to keep women from a public life, keep children coming, no matter the circumstance or individual cost, and then there will continue to be a large population that can continue to be exploited or used for war.
It’s exactly what happened when covid hit—the world was able to stop, an enforced moment of collective solitude, and many found they did not like what they saw. But then we fall back into the same dictates when society comes together again. A society of people kept unwhole, distracted, trying to meet the demands of a society that was never made for healing one’s self.
Whole, healed people are not exploitable—they are something to be feared because they will break society’s rules.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, solitude had become pathologized, taking on characteristics that are still considered fearful, eccentric. A Treatise on Insanity written in 1801 by Philippe Pinel defined the principal characteristics of such an illness:
The symptoms generally comprehended by the term melancholia are taciturnity, a thoughtful pensive air, gloomy suspicions, and a love of solitude.5
As David Vincent writes, in A History of Solitude, how a person arranged their time became the legitimate concern of European doctors. Too much time alone raised warning flags.
Never mind that this describes, ahem, me and nearly everyone I find connection with. How on earth can we not be taciturn, pensive, and hold gloomy suspicions in a world intent on distraction with doom scrolling, comparison, consumption, while war and exploitation goes on? Good grief. Yes, the world is insane, but let’s pathologize the ones who say it out loud.
Around this same time—1801—the term lonely, meaning “dejected for want of company,” became common.
Loneliness was a new social worry, a term used negatively by the romantics, who sought solitude in nature, but made a distinction in the idea of loneliness—a fear of the rising populations of urban centers and industry, of the unending interaction with strangers, the ceaseless drone of machinery with no escape to reflect, hear one’s self think.
Of course we hear much about loneliness and isolation of individuals as a concern of our own time, with ministries of loneliness being established in governments across the world, even before covid struck. But this is not a new or distinct anxiety to our own time, as much as we might be told that social media is at fault.
In a 1930 satiric essay, On Loneliness, G.K. Chesterton wrote:
One of the finer manifestations of an indefatigable patriotism has taken the form of an appeal to the nation on the subject of Loneliness. This complains that the individual is isolated in England, in a sense unknown in most other countries, and demands that something should be done at once to link up all these lonely individuals in a chain of sociability.6
The social anxieties we are informed about repeatedly—languishing, epidemics of loneliness—are certainly not false, but I’ve grown increasingly weary of listening to what researchers and journalists—all of whom are propelled by a need to increase profit—say is wrong with us. The noise needs to be dialed down in order to hear the truth that underlies it.
It is in society that men quarrel with their friends; it is in solitude that they forgive them.
G.K. CHESTERTON
Koller, in Stations of Solitude, writes about her experiences of work—she lived on the poverty line nearly her whole life, despite having a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard, working in the same job as Sylvia Plath once had, and alongside a generation of women who were willfully discriminated against. After several acts of refusal to the academic work world, she writes:
There are reasons for rules. And if you can’t find the reason, if the people who insist on the rule can’t give you the reason, there may be none…Because the first time the thing was done, or done that way, there was a reason, now obviously lost in the mists of history, sometimes as long ago as a year and a half. And the reason could be good or bad, sound or groundless. Who is to know which, until you bring it up to the light to look at?7
Jenny Odell writes similarly in her book How to do Nothing:
…mainstream society needs the perspective of its outsiders and recluses to illuminate problems and alternatives that aren’t visible from the inside.8
The space for solitude that I am working to sustain is so much a part of that desire, need to bring the things of life up to the light. I crave it, and without it, my body reacts—with anxiety, migraines, insomnia. When I left the museum and turned to writing (finally) I haven’t had a headache, despite a life of chronic migraines. I still can’t quite believe it was that simple—or complicated, I’m not sure it isn’t both.
Koller writes:
The obscenity lies in this: human beings can ask questions. ‘Can:’ are able to. Not ‘may:’ are permitted to. And being able to ask but not asking, people abdicate, tissue by tissue, their chief difference from stones. Stones move in whatever direction you shove them because they can—are able to—obey only the laws of gravity and friction, laws they did not make. We obey those same laws when we fall. But our lives aren’t only falling or being eroded by wind and water.9
Solitude allows us to ask questions, to accept the pause with grace, to figure out and know that there are parts of our lives that are not stones, that are not subject to the forces of erosion and the directions society pushes us to.
I understand completely that for some people solitude is anxiety itself—the need for companionship, for sympathy in this human experience is enormous. It’s lucky that our solitude now is more than ever a networked one—with ways to reach out to one another instantly even if disembodied. And that’s a type of balance that I find reassuring—those conversations on pages between readers, the comments you share with me, the connections we make together.
How amazing we can do that to such positive ends, and yet so much of society uses it instead to troll, shame, compare, lie to anyone deemed to be other. Of course—that’s the social part of media. Society demands that we leave our home, fit into certain genders, classes, races, categories to be consumed and compared, measured against. Social media just does what society has always been trying to do to the individuals it needs to survive.
I don’t have an answer for the right way of anything. But I do know that I have struggled to keep room for solitude, and have begun making my own rules about what and when and where I can compromise that. Once we know we don’t have to follow unless our own volition is behind it as well, our own interest, it’s hard to go back and have to stay silent. We can’t all be free from the demands of moneying, as Koller calls it, but we can carve out our ways of solitude, find small ways to refuse what feels wrong, to refuse rules that have no reason behind them—or worse have a very specific reason that works against us.
That’s what I want to be able to find in moments of solitude—light shined on different shards, ways of being that offer something different and complex—apart from the homogenization that society is inclined to. To stand both apart and with:
But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the “wrong way”; a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.10
So here’s to January feelings—moments of pause, moments of networked solitude. To meet others in the common space of refusal, and find ways to live that are more whole, more healing, more loving than the rules and paths we are told we must follow.
Koller, Alice. 1991. The Stations of Solitude. Bantam.
Ibid. p. 73
Ibid. p. 56
Vincent, David. 2020. A History of Solitude. Polity Press. p. 5
Ibid, p. 9
Quoted in Vincent, p. 21
Koller, p. 59
Odell, Jenny. 2019. How to do Nothing. Melville House Press, NY. p. 56
Koller, p. 60
Odell, p. 62
The pause of January
I'm finding I'm not getting ENOUGH solitude these days. A couple hours driving alone, or wandering solo outside, every couple days isn't enough. I need a few days (weeks? months?) straight of glorious, disconnected SOLITUDE. I think I'm getting a little brain rattled. If that makes me taciturn and gloomy, then so be it. 😏
I came to suggest you read May Sarton's "Journal of a Solitude," but I see another commenter beat me to it! This sentence, in particular, made me think of Sarton: "She writes about it all with precision, wit, egotism, and too much fervor and detail at times." Am intrigued by the Koller book - must put it on the too long list.