I finished Robert Hughes’ stirring memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, a few weeks ago. I’ve been wanting to note this passage here for some time.
The best thing fishing taught me, I think, was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of a writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jabs and jerks of association. O beata solitudo–o sola beatudo! Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people’s amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the world’s great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at. Our culture puts enormous emphasis on “socialization,” on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others: the psychologically “successful” person is less an individual than a citizen, linked by a hundred cords and filaments to his or her fellow-humans and discovering fulfillment in relations with others.This belief becomes coercive, and in many cases tyrannous and even morbid, in a society like the United States, with its accursed, anodyne cults of togetherness. But perhaps as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr pointed out, solitude may be a greater and more benign motor of creativity in adult life than any number of family relations, love affairs, group identifications, or friendships. We are continually beleaguered by the promise of what is in fact a false life, based on unnecessary reactions to external stimuli. Inside every writer, to paraphrase the well-worn mot of Cyril Connolly, an only child is wildly signaling to be let out. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect,” wrote Thomas De Quincey, “who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”
A few quick thoughts:
1. I believe at least some of my faculty colleagues resist their online lives, even at the cost of access to very compelling resources, because they sense a reduction in solitude. I do not myself believe that life online necessarily reduces solitude, but to be fair, most of the talk I hear and myself propogate about the virtues of life online have to do with the kind of togetherness Hughes rightly cautions us about. Bear me witness, my far-flung friends and collaborators: I crave the network, the “thinking-together,” what Vickie Suter called the “thought-jam band.” Yet I am a writer, too, and I crave my solitude as well, and recognize it as a garden that must be tended. With walls, though easily crossed and connected, for walls give shape to the tending.
2. I have expanded a little on my thoughts above in this comment on Jon Udell’s recent blog post on “The essence of openness“:
Collaboration exists at the boundary between self and other, between tribes (what’s a family but a small tribe?), and depends on both the boundary and the crossing to work. In my view, if we talk about erasing boundaries, we risk erasing selfhood and thus one element of true collaboration. Instead, we should talk about boundaries and crossings in the same breath, think them in the same thought. Maybe something like the idea of “semi-permeable†is what I’m trying to get at here.
Milton is all over this idea in “Paradise Lost.â€
3. I want my students to thrive together and alone. These are synergistic, symbiotic skills.
4. Hughes’ word “anodyne” gives me pause.
5. In a peculiar way that I’m not sure I fully understand yet, blogging seems to give me both solitude and togetherness. As, presumably, writing and publishing do for Hughes, on whom the gentle ironies of mass publication of his thoughts on solitude are surely not lost.
