Solitude: a philosophical encounter

 Thoreau exclaimed, “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Companionable? But then is it a solitude, if the loons and the raindrops are companions? Nor is this merely an eccentric remark by a man who loved paradox; for you can find in Byron’s Childe Harold a very similar exclamation

       Then stirs the feeling infinite, so felt

       In solitude, where we are least alone;5

and you can read the same sentiment in Petrarch, who objects that St. Ambrose stole it from Scipio.6 What did they all mean, exactly?

Then too, these crowings about solitude sometimes conflict with each other. Wordsworth wrote often of solitude in words like these:

       . . . we are laid asleep

       in body, and become a living soul:

       while with an eye made quiet by the power

       of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

       we see into the life of things.

(from “Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”)

Yet he also wrote the “Elegiac Stanza” of 1805:

       Farewell, farewell the heart that lives alone,

       Housed in a dream, at distance from the Kind!

       Such happiness, wherever it be known,

       Is to be pitied; for ’tis surely blind.

Sight or blindness, which is solitude? Indeed, the conflicts grow worse. Compare, for example, Proust’s famous drearity,

       Notwithstanding the illusion by which we would

       fain be cheated and with which, out of

       friendship, politeness, deference and duty, we

       cheat other people, we exist alone.7

with D. H. Lawrence’s insistence that

       Everything, even individuality itself, depends

       on relationship . . . The light shines only when

       the circuit is completed.

       My individualism is really an illusion. I am

       part of the great whole, and I can never

       escape.8

Once the possibility of general illusion is raised, even solid ground begins to feel shaky. Perhaps those famous solitudes just recalled were not really solitudes after all? True, St. Antony lived alone in a cave for twenty years; but they were twenty years of prayer, and if prayer is communion with God, and if God is conceived as a personage . . . where is the solitude? Or take the immured Sisters: if they could see into the church and follow the service at the altar, if they could look out upon daily village life outside the cell, if they were surrounded on all sides by people with whom they felt some connection . . . what then? Is it so absurd to call their solitude illusory, as Lawrence appears to wish to do? Or consider Kafka. Is writing, at some level, always writing-for-others, and so a kind of quasi-engagement? Is living in the characters as one creates them a kind of surrogate encounter? If so, would it follow that Kafka was not really alone in that silence all those nights?

Proust might seem easier to dismiss, but his descriptions of the isolated detachment of what ought to be intimate personal encounters certainly make one cringe:

I might, if I chose, take Albertine upon my knee, take her head in my hands; I might caress her, passing my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or the light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity.9

5.  Byron, Childe Harold, Canto III, Stanzas 842–43.

6.  Francesco Petrarch, De Vita Solitaria, trans. Jacob Zeitlin (Westport: Hyperion Press, 1978), p. 288. Compare this line from Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book IX, line 249): “For Solitude, sometimes is best society.” Edward Gibbon expressed the same feeling: “I was never less alone than while by myself” (Memoirs, I).

7.  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (Paris: Pleiade, 1954), vol. III, p. 459.

8.  Cited in Paul Halmos, Solitude and Privacy (New York: Greenwood Press, 1953), p. v.

9.  Proust, op. cit., p. 393.

Solitude: a philosophical encounter

by Philip Koch.