Solitude
“To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both: a philosopher.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Importance of Solitude
Solitude may be thought of as a subjective state in which your mind is free from the influence of other minds. It’s not necessarily being physically alone, but it is learning to be with yourself. With some intentionality and discipline, one may eventually learn to achieve it at any time and in any place.
Solitude is critical to human flourishing because it allows us the opportunity to exercise our minds without distraction. In the past, so many people didn’t have a choice but to endure long periods of relative solitude. Today, of course, it’s all too easy to spend every waking hour engaged with and distracted by the technological world.
Thinkers such as Henry David Thoreau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Jung all recognized the need to withdraw from society to read, reflect, meditate, and create. Even Superman retreated to his Fortress of Solitude. A great many creative individuals made a habit of taking meandering walks through nature for several hours at a stretch. In fact, Blaise Pascal believed that “all of humanity’s problems stem from a man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” If individuals such as these understood the importance of solitude, then perhaps we should as well.
The Baptism of Solitude by Paul Bowles
Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets, there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' It is a unique sensation, and it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory disappears...A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.
Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price.
“A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“Man who is imperceptible on the scale of the universe, is a whole world compared to the nothingness we cannot comprehend. Man is suspended between two abysses of Nothing and the Infinite.”
