THE END OF SOLITUDE
What does the contemporary self want? The camera created a culture of celebrity; the computer has created a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge—broadband tipping the web from text to image, social networking spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: it wants to be seen. If not by the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then by the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.
So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be by ourselves. Though I shouldn’t say taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told that a teenager I know had sent three thousand instant messages one recent month. That’s one hundred a day, or about one every ten waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and weekends, class time, lunchtime, homework time, and tooth-brushing time. So, on average, she’s never alone for more than ten minutes at once. Which means, she’s never alone. I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of being alone so unsettling that she will sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anybody want to be alone?
To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Humans may be social animals, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the act of being alone has always been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the community renews its relationship with God. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Collective experience may be the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, their face bright with the old truth.
Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinson’s interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by turning the soul inward, impelling it to encounter God, like the prophets of old, in “profound isolation.” To her enumeration of Calvin, Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early modern selves, we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last of these alerts us to the essential role of reading in this transformation. “[T]he soul encountered itself in response to a text,” Robinson writes, “first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass.” With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, all.
But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude was still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but Nature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: the poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural exemplar. But since Romanticism also inherited the eighteenth-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with friendship. For Emerson, “The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.” The Romantic practice of solitude is neatly captured by Trilling’s “sincerity”: the belief that the self is validated by a congruity of private essence and public appearance, one that stabilizes its relationship with both itself and others. Especially, as Emerson suggests, one beloved other. Hence the famous Romantic friendship pairs: Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Hawthorne and Melville.
Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its conception of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume’s social sympathy gave way to Pater’s thick wall of personality and Freud’s narcissism—the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can’t choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs—Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald—were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts.
The world was now understood as an assault on the self, and with good reason. The Romantic ideal of solitude developed in part as a reaction to the emergence of the modern city. In modernism, the city is not only more menacing than ever; it is inescapable, a labyrinth: Eliot’s London, Joyce’s Dublin. The mob, the human mass, presses in. Hell is other people. The soul is forced back into itself—hence the development of a more austere, more embattled form of self-validation, Trilling’s “authenticity,” where one’s essential relationship is with oneself. Solitude becomes the arena of heroic self-discovery, a voyage through interior realms made vast and terrifying by Nietzschean and Freudian insights. To achieve authenticity is to look upon these visions without flinching; Trilling’s exemplar here is Mr. Kurtz. Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God, then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self—a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.
But we no longer live in the modernist city, and our great fear is not submersion by the mass but isolation from the herd. After World War II, urbanization gave way to suburbanization, and with it the universal threat of loneliness. What technologies of transportation exacerbated—we could live farther and farther apart—technologies of communication redressed—we could bring ourselves closer and closer together. Or so, at least, we imagined. The first of those technologies, the first simulacrum of proximity, was the telephone. “Reach out and touch someone,” the slogan went. But through the ’70s and ’80s, our isolation grew. Suburbs became exurbs. Families grew smaller or splintered apart. Mothers went to work. The electronic hearth became the television in every room. Even in childhood, certainly in adolescence, we were trapped inside our own cocoons. Soaring crime rates, and even more sharply escalating rates of moral panic, pulled children off the streets. The idea that you could go outside and run around the neighborhood with your friends, once unquestionable, became unthinkable. The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space.
In these circumstances, the internet arrived as an incalculable blessing. We should never forget that. It has allowed isolated people to communicate with each other and marginalized people to find each other. The busy parent can stay in touch with far-flung friends. The gay adolescent no longer must feel like a freak. But as the internet’s dimensionality has grown, it has quickly become too much of a good thing. Ten years ago, we were writing emails on desktop computers and transmitting them over dial-up connections. Now we are sending text messages on our BlackBerrys, posting pictures on our MySpace pages, and following complete strangers on Twitter. A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired into the electronic hive—though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to be known, to become a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are following me on Twitter? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now it is impossible to be alone.
Which means that we are losing both halves of the Romantic dialectic. What does friendship mean when you have 532 “friends”? How does it enhance my sense of closeness when Facebook tells me that Sally McNally (whom I haven’t seen since high school, and wasn’t really friends with even then) “is making coffee and staring off into space”? Exchanging emails, let alone instant messaging or writing on people’s “walls,” is very far from having a sustained conversation. Never mind the information that facial and vocal cues convey. We respond instinctively, deep in our bodies, to faces and voices. Letters, which had their own sensuality, once sought to reproduce the contours of the voice through the medium of language, but to pull off that trick, one needs to know how to write. Emoticons won’t do it. My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And, of course, they have no time whatsoever for solitude.
But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want. As jarring as the new dispensation may be for people in their thirties and forties, the real problem is that it is completely natural for people in their teens and twenties. Young people today appear to have no desire for solitude, have never heard of it, cannot imagine why it might be worth having. In fact, their use of technology—or to be fair, our use of technology—seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others. As long ago as 1952, Trilling could write of “the modern fear of being cut off from the social group even for a moment,” and now we have equipped ourselves with the means to prevent that fear from ever being realized. Which does not mean that we have put it to rest. Quite the contrary. Remember my student, who couldn’t even write a paper by herself. The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it grows.
The situation is analogous, it seems to me, to the previous generation’s experience of boredom. The two emotions, of course, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern—neither word existed, at least in our sense, before the nineteenth century. Suburbanization, by eliminating the stimulation as well as the sociability of urban or traditional village life, exacerbated the tendency to both. But the great age of boredom came in with television, and precisely because television was designed to alleviate that feeling. Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do; it is only the negative experience of that condition. Television, by eliminating the need to learn to make use of one’s lack of occupation, prevents one from discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored—so you turn on the television.
I speak from experience. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, deep in the heart of the age of television. I was trained to be bored; boredom was cultivated within me like a precious crop. It took me years to discover that having nothing to do does not have to be a bad thing. (And my nervous system will never fully adjust to the idea. I still have to fight against boredom, am permanently damaged in this respect.) But there is an alternative to boredom, and it is what Whitman called idleness: a state of passive receptivity to the world.
So it is with the current generation’s experience of being alone. Being alone does not have to make you feel lonely. That is precisely the recognition implicit in the idea of solitude, which is to loneliness what idleness is to boredom. Loneliness is not the absence of company; it is grief about that absence. The lost sheep is lonely; the shepherd is not lonely. But the internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom. If six hours of television a day creates the aptitude for boredom, the inability to sit still, a hundred instant messages a day creates the aptitude for loneliness, the inability to be by yourself. You could call your schoolmates when I was a teenager, but you couldn’t call them a hundred times a day. You could get together with your friends when I was in college, but you couldn’t always get together with them when you wanted to, because you couldn’t always find them. If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the generation of the web. We lost the ability to be still, our capacity for idleness. They have lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude.
And losing solitude, what else have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans and the Romantics and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life—of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing “in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures,” “bait[ing our] hooks with darkness.” Lost, as well, is the related propensity for sustained reading. The internet brought text back into a televisual world, but it brought it back on terms dictated by that world—that is, by its remapping of our attention spans. Reading now means skipping and skimming; five minutes on the same web page is considered an eternity. This is no longer reading as Robinson described it, the encounter with a second self in the silence of mental solitude.
But we no longer believe in the solitary mind. If the Romantics had Hume and the modernists had Freud, the current psychological model—and this should come as no surprise—is that of the networked or social mind. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that our brains developed to interpret complex social signals; cognitive scientists, according to David Brooks, that “our decision-making is powerfully influenced by social context”; neuroscientists, that we have “permeable minds” that function in part through a process of “deep imitation”; psychologists, that “we are organized by our attachments”; sociologists, that our behavior is affected by “the power of social networks.” The cumulative implication is that all of mental space is social—contemporary social science dovetailing here with postmodern critical theory.
One of the most striking things about the way that young people relate to one another today is that they no longer seem to believe in the existence of Thoreau’s “darkness.” The MySpace page has replaced the journal and the letter as a way of creating and communicating a sense of self. The suggestion is not only that such communication is to be made to the world at large rather than to oneself or one’s intimates, or graphically rather than verbally, or performatively rather than narratively or analytically, but also that it can be made completely. Today’s young people seem to feel that they can make themselves fully known to one another. They seem to lack a sense of their own depths, and of the value of keeping them hidden.
If they didn’t, they would understand that solitude enables us to secure the integrity of the self, as well as to explore it. Few have shown this more beautifully than Woolf. In the middle of Mrs. Dalloway, between her navigation of the streets and her orchestration of the party, between the urban jostle and the social bustle, Clarissa goes up, “like a nun withdrawing,” to her attic room. Like a nun: she returns to a state that she herself imagines as a kind of virginity. That doesn’t mean that she’s a prude. Virginity is classically the outward sign of spiritual inviolability, of a self untouched by the world, a soul that has preserved its integrity by refusing to descend into the chaos and self-division of sexual and social relations. It is the mark of the saint and the monk, of Antigone and Joan of Arc. Solitude is both the social image of that state and the means by which we can approximate it. And the supreme image in Mrs. Dalloway of the dignity of solitude itself is the old woman whom Clarissa catches sight of through her window. “Here was one room,” she thinks, “there another.” We are not merely social beings. We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed within that selfhood.
To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it. Solitude, said Emerson, “is to genius the stern friend.” The university was to be praised, he believed, if only for this, that it provided students with “a separate chamber and fire”—Woolf’s room of one’s own, the physical space of solitude. For no real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude. “The saint and poet seek privacy,” Emerson said, “to ends the most public and universal.”
Solitude isn’t easy, and it isn’t for everyone. It has surely always been the province of the few. “I believe,” said Thoreau, “that men are generally still a little afraid of the dark.” Marguerite and Milton will always be the exceptions, or to speak in more relevant terms, the young man or woman—for they still exist—who prefers to loaf and invite their soul, who steps to the beat of a different drummer. But if solitude disappears as a social value and idea, will even the exceptions be possible? Still, one finally cannot worry about the drift of the culture, which one is in any case powerless to reverse. One can only save oneself—and whatever else occurs, one can still always do that.
It takes a willingness to be unpopular, however. The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn’t very polite. Thoreau knew that the “doubleness” that solitude cultivates, the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows, to say nothing of the offense implicit in avoiding their company. But then, he didn’t worry overmuch about being genial. He didn’t even like having to talk to people three times a day, at meals; one can only imagine what he would have made of instant messaging. We, however, have made of geniality—the weak smile, the polite interest, the fake invitation—a cardinal virtue. Friendship may be slipping from our grasp, but our friendliness is universal. Not for nothing does “gregarious” mean “part of the herd.” But Thoreau understood that securing one’s self-possession was worth a few wounded feelings. He may have put his neighbors off, but at least he was sure of himself. Those who would find solitude must not be afraid to stand alone.
[2009]
Copyright © 2022 by William Deresiewicz
