{"id":78,"date":"2010-08-22T19:52:52","date_gmt":"2010-08-23T00:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circledword.net\/?p=78"},"modified":"2010-08-22T19:52:52","modified_gmt":"2010-08-23T00:52:52","slug":"assessing-solitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/?p=78","title":{"rendered":"Assessing Solitude"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The End of Solitude<\/a>,” an early 2009 essay by William Deresiewicz, thoughtfully surveys changing perspectives on solitude by teasing out its relationship to changing social and aesthetic trends. Deresiewicz examines early to modern European culture as well as life and literature in the United States from around 1850 through the present in the process of illuminating a yawning gap that seems to be opening in our society. This gap exists between, on one side, a set of people exemplified by students of Deresiewicz’s, who have said to him, “Why would anyone want to be alone?” and indicated that the prospect of being alone was “unsettling,” and on the other side, people who, still connected to the thought of Emerson and Thoreau, possess a “propensity for introspection” and a desire to “protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus.”<\/p>\n

As Deresiewicz also highlights, a capacity for solitude is linked in western culture with a capacity for intimate friendship. The lack of an ability to be alone is, in turn, linked to loneliness. Deresiewicz had more to say about friendship in a later essay entitled Faux Friendship<\/a>, and a quite recent essay by Daniel Akst entitled “America: Land of Loners?<\/a>” corroborates Deresiewicz’s linkage of solitude and friendship. Akst persuasively outlines how people in the U.S., while almost overwhelmed by diluted, voluntary, flexible friendships, have progressively lost touch with intimate friendship and have become correspondingly lonely and isolated. As he puts it, despite our contacts, pals, and incessant “friending,” “we’ve come to demand of ourselves truly radical levels of emotional self-sufficiency.”<\/p>\n

While acknowledging the benefits of the Internet, Deresiewicz locates the cause of lost capacities for solitude and intimacy in a “consistent stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated” that “keeps us wired in to the electronic hive.” Those of us who are thoroughly “wired in” look across a wide gap of difference at those of us who disconnect from the hive regularly “to hold oneself apart from society” and “to begin to think one’s way beyond it,” partly in order to preserve “a dialectical relationship with sociability.” In almost all respects, I find Deresiewicz’s essay compelling, and I am certain that many people in the developed world born before 1980 feel the gap he describes keenly — especially people who work at colleges and high schools interacting with young people. I know I do.<\/p>\n

Yet, the essay troubles me, too, in the embedment of its notion of “solitude” in a class of privilege. To the extent that the “end of solitude” is a result of the effects of Internet use, it must necessarily be extremely limited geographically. Solitude in many parts of the globe must be flourishing. According to a publication by the United Nations, Measuring the Information Society 2010<\/a>, only 18% of the populations of so-called “developing” countries were using the Internet in 2009. If one takes China out of that number, only 14% were. Is the demise of solitude in the U.S. as explicated by Deresiewicz also a mark of a yawning gap between us and most of the rest of the world?<\/p>\n

Solitude is free; it does not cost one money. To a large extent, its benefits are available to all subgroups of humanity, since introspection, contemplation, and meditation are not dependent on wealth or education. Is this to say that the disproportionate wealth and corresponding consumption available in “the west” work directly against the capacity for solitude? I would be interested to find a European perspective on this. Europe in 2009 had the highest percentage of people using the Internet (66%). Is solitude waning there also? Is intimacy? It would also be invaluable to find perspectives on solitude and intimacy from those parts of the world less wired than us. From those points of view, does it hold that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and a capacity for solitude?<\/p>\n

While solitude is free, nevertheless it seems that to cultivate the finer fruits of solitude, one needs certain access or accoutrements, such as wandering in wilderness or books. According to Deresiewicz’s essay, and in my experience, reading especially enhances and deepens solitude. Books and literacy open doors to discovery — imaginative exploration of the external world and of the internal self. In-depth knowledge requires a propensity for sustained reading, not skimming, scanning, and 140-character blurbs. Reading is (as Deresiewicz tells us in his reference to Marilynne Robinson) “the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.” Reading allows us to meet other thinkers and consider their thoughts while we remain in a space of self-reflection. Reading incorporates and strengthens the dialectic between solitude and sociability.<\/p>\n

We thus encounter once more a relationship between wealth and solitude, but in the reading-solitude relationship we have the opposite to the Internet-solitude relationship. For in this context, wealth, with its attendant education and access to books, supports solitude. Where does this leave us? May wealth indirectly be both necessary and detrimental to solitude? Is solitude a modern luxury derived from a bygone benefit of a more widely distributed and smaller global population? Solitude currently remains in any case a bedrock for dispassionate observation, integrity, and creativity in the eyes of many people in various circumstances, a testament to its ongoing value. Will the “wired in” lifestyle somehow evolve to reincorporate that value?<\/p>\n

William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,”\u00a0The Chronicle Review<\/em>, 2009. http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/The-End-of-Solitude\/3708\/<\/a><\/p>\n

William Deresiewicz, “Faux Friendship,” The Chronicle Review<\/em>, 2009. http:\/\/chronicle.com\/article\/Faux-Friendship\/49308\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Akst, “America: Land of Loners?” The Wilson Quarterly<\/em>, 2010. http:\/\/www.wilsonquarterly.com\/article.cfm?AID=1631<\/a><\/p>\n

United Nations, ITU, Measuring the Information Society 2010<\/em>, 2010. http:\/\/www.itu.int\/ITU-D\/ict\/publications\/idi\/2010\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The End of Solitude,” an early 2009 essay by William Deresiewicz, thoughtfully surveys changing perspectives on solitude by teasing out its relationship to changing social and aesthetic trends. Deresiewicz examines early to modern European culture as well as life and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,6,12,10,8,11,5,13,9],"class_list":["post-78","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-akst","tag-deresiewicz","tag-emerson","tag-friendship","tag-itu","tag-reading","tag-solitude","tag-thoreau","tag-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circledword.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}