Prelude

"I wish I were a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas"
     T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

     I mix my animal metaphors, in the title of this blog and the epigraph, but to a purpose: to emphasize the solitary natures of the lone wolf and Prufrock's aged crustacean.  Why write about the many types of solitude and the urge, if not the need, to be alone?  Because if we do not capture what possibilities for solitude still exist in our our hyper-fast world, we might miss them, leaving us the poorer.

    Of course, it may seem that we already enjoy far too much solitude: the digitalized nature of our experience, be it mediated by the screen of a hand-held device, of a computer or other gadget, is one that heightens isolation.  Yet pixilated isolation is not solitude, and those obligated to spend their workdays in front of a screen are not hermits.

     For myself, I have always been more at ease alone than in most company.  The one big exception to this was a relationship which lasted the better part of my life to date, which ended with his death a few years ago.  Over these years I have returned to my solo self, seeing the world with one pair of eyes, where before there were two: I am decoupled.  Writing about that experience is to construct another persona, born of the decoupling.

     Writers, of course have to be alone to work.  Editors, legal draftsmen, journalists, and speechwriters need  to block out distractions to write, but they work within well-established frameworks.  In contrast, the writer who wants to create literature needs more than freedom from interruptions, he needs to bring up from his subconscious the literary work gestating.  Like a prospector hunting for gold, he needs to unearth nuggets of human experience, hoping he has found the true metal and not fool's gold:  great writers are those who have found a vein and can keep returning to it, book after book.  Writers starting out search for a literary vein, but the act of writing does not guarantee writing well.  The solitude of a once-striving writer let down by his small talent must therefore be very sad.

     Before there were words, however, there was the spark that made the words flow, the stimulus and the response:  Both likely experienced in solitude.  Keats' experience contemplating a nightingale and his poetry about the moments he did so took place alone.  Some time later, Wordsworth called poetry "emotion recollected in tranquility", the poet's refraction of his inspiration into words.  Again, that inspiration is experienced outside the presence of others, likewise the tranquility that abets the building of pictures with words.  True, romantic poets have cornered the market on sublime experience inspired by nature, but not on the human capacity to know keenly an experience.  Otherwise, we would be mere automatons with nothing more to feel, or to know.

     The difficulty is that the more sensations bombard us, the harder it is to judge our internal reactions as authentic.  In fact, the more sensations created by machines dominate our consciousness, the harder it is to value experience that is outside that realm.  We may go to the country to get away from the computer, but when we look outside the window are we looking at the tree, or just luxuriating in not having to look at the screen?

     If we are not given the opportunity to enjoy our own company, why would we seek out solitude?  Being alone is disparaged, as to be alone is to be fundamentally at odds with the group, and therefore threatening.  It takes effort to leave the pack, and it is suspect to do so.  Yet it is indispensable to self-knowledge.  Zen masters, Tibetan Buddhists, Cistercian monks and those who imitate their practices know quiet hastens confrontation with the person inside.

     Solitariness is not alienation.  I return to the epigraph, as Prufrock's cry is that of a man who wants to be alone, to escape the polite society that keeps him from his authentic self.  Women dominate the circles he moves in, salons where one false word can lead to the social death Prufrock fears.  Yet Prufrock does not want liberation from his neuroses, he wants permanent exile in a hard shell, sensory deprivation in a watery world.  The desire for escape churning inside Prufrock's subconscious amid the superficial chatter is a death wish, just another variation on Prufrock's instinct for self-abnegation.  So alienation is not solitariness.  Nor is it solitude.

     Over the weeks to come I hope to limn solitariness and solitude as it exists in metropolitan life.  Perhaps I will open a Pandora's box of useless typescript, sending out demons into the world, leaving myself exposed to the charge of having wasted readers' time, failing in my task, leaving no one more enlightened than before I put fingers to keyboard.  But I want to try, if just to pass the time.