My neighborhood is full of booksellers: not bookshops, but men selling books on the street. Most of these are men living in near indigence, in shelters or rented rooms. They get their stock from what is thrown out or given to them by their more affluent neighbors. As the area is home to a great university, readers are in great supply.
The men put out their tables in the morning. The least well off never pack up at day's end: they live in shelters and have nowhere to put their inventory. So they put plastic covers over the folding tables, or pack the stock in large plastic tubs they leave by their usual spot. The neighborhood respects the property of the booksellers as far as I can tell. I have walked past two or three tubs left unguarded several days in a row and seen nothing molested; and, while buyers may sometimes take a book left on a table while the bookseller is away, the men tell me people generally return to pay the price marked inside the book.
I bought a Lawyer's Diary for the year 1931 from one of the booksellers. I am fascinated by old books, they speak to me. This one is a lawyer's diary, the way lawyers kept track of hours billed clients in the days before computers. When I practiced law in the 1980s, lawyer's diaries were still around, red volumes given to associates and partners in law firms. Now, or course, the entries are kept on computers.
This diary comes straight the world of Prufrock: published ten years after Eliot's publication of his famous poem, it is a fat book, groaning with information and advertisements, also, requests for legacies:
An appeal is made for the claims of ST. DUNSTAN'S to be borne in mind when charitable bequests are under consideration. St. Dunstan's is solely responsible for the training, settlement and lifelong after-care of over two thousand men who have been blinded as the result of their service for King and Country.
Those blinded men were, like as not, survivors of the First World War, which had ended only thirteen years before the Lawyers' Diary was published. Next year we commemorate its centennial.
Other charities appealing for funds are more ancient:
Dr. Barnardo's Homes (Founded 1866): "No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission." Motto For God and Country." NO RED TAPE. NO WAITING LIST. NO VOTES REQUIRED. 109,000 Children have been admitted. 17,797 Children and young people dealt with last year. 8,000 Children always being supported. 474 are Crippled, Invalid, Deaf and Dumb, physically afflicted or sick. 30, 257 Young People have been migrated to Canada and the Overseas Dominions. L500 ENDOWS A BED FOR A HEALTHY CHILD. LEGACIES AND ENDOWMENTS WILL BE APPRECIATED.
And my favorite, and the most venerable:
Eight Hundred Years in the Service of Humanity.
St. Bartholomew's Hospital
London, E.C.1.
FOUNDED ON PRESENT SITE A.D. 1123.
Patron - - HIS MAJESTY THE KING.
President - - H.R.H. THE PRINCE OF WALES, K.G.
In-Patients (1929) 10,025
Out-Patients' Attendances (1929) 469,697
Street Accident Cases (1929) 2,941
THE MOTHER HOSPITAL OF THE EMPIRE. . . . requires L89 A DAY
in order to continue its merciful work.
A DAY can be named for a year for a contribution of L50 (Cot L30). This can be renewed from year to year if desired.
A BED can be named in perpetuity by a donation or legacy of L1,000 (Cot L600). In this way permanent and appropriate tribute may be paid to the memory of friends.
Treasurer - - The Right Hon. LORD STANMORE.
Bankers - - THE BANK OF ENGLAND.
Do not accuse me of indulging in "Golden Age Fantasy" by publishing these relics here. We all know the thirties were the decade when the unquenched passions of the First World War came inexorably to a head, bursting into the Second. I offer these quaint examples of charity at work only to demonstrate that the impulse to do good precedes us, and may have been exercised as tenderly as any we now vaunt.
The marginalized men who sell books on my neighborhood's streets, how would they have been treated in London, 1931?
Monday, November 4, 2013
Sunday, November 3, 2013
A World Without Privacy
November 3, 2013
Imagine a world without privacy: Your neighbors look through your windows, you are surveilled by the government, retail companies track all your preferences, your personal information is available online, and photos of you taken at different stages of your life are readily available on the Internet.
Some would say that is the definition of a political candidate, but it is not of them that I am thinking. Rather, it is of every one of us: more and more we give away all sorts of bits of information about ourselves without pausing to consider how doing so might eventually make less, rather than more, of our lives.
Take internet dating sites, which ask prospective users to supply answers to all sorts of questions of a personal nature, ranging from "Have you ever had sex with someone of your own gender?" to "Do you recycle?" The data is all voluntarily supplied with a view to matching up those with similar likes and dislikes and providing a template for projected compatibility.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the answers to the questions are any more true than the declarations of love of virtual partners. No doubt a social scientist will interject an objection to my skepticism here, averring that well-constructed surveys yield remarkably consistent evidence that certain types consistently prefer to be involved with people having similar characteristics, allowing room for a degree of individual manifestation of these characteristics. Romances can develop between people brought together specifically because they match for compatibility.
My own take is that 1. we live in an unromantic age, so romance is a rarity; 2. when it does happen, it does so because the two people enjoy an intuitive complicity that cannot be programmed for. Well-crafted questionnaires may be able to determine which people will share similar views on fundamental questions, but they don't generate that spark that used to be called love.
Romantic love, is of course, a concept that emerged in the waning of the Middle Ages: tales of a high-born married woman chastely courted by a virtuous knight propagated an ideal of intimate relations between men and women driven by the natural affinity of two persons, rather than dynastic ambitions. The ideal enjoyed centuries of popularity not just because it was nearly unattainable, but also because it enshrined the individuality of the two lovers, and the inimitable nature of their affections. Each great pair of lovers - Abelard and Heloise, Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Iseult-- loves in their way, which is distinct from any of the others'.
Which makes that idealized romantic love, when it exists outside the literary sources from which it sprang, a way of differentiating ourselves from the common run of mere relationships of convenience. Students of romantic love in the groves of academe will agree that such love manifests itself only in the early stages of a relationship, and that unless there is a progression to a more practical level, the two individuals will drift apart. So even as we may initially love and lose ourselves in another, the continuance of the relationship requires acceptance of the mundane aspects of life together. These heighten our sense of being separate individuals with separate preferences, if most of the time we prefer what life together offers to life lived alone.
What that life together can offer is tenderness, mutual understanding and solidarity. In a world where privacy is less and less possible however, those aspects of love are challenged by competing claims: the drive for professional advancement and public recognition, the impulse towards public display of success; and the herd instinct that makes people of similar social or professional backgrounds follow similar trends in clothing, entertainment and transportation choices.
We are a consumer society and our relationships are built around consumption, which requires display. There is little inhibition about self-display left: other than sending around naked photos of oneself, no one thinks putting photos of themselves on social media sites is exhibitionism. Yet we are "celebritizing" ourselves by doing so, and adopting all the narcissistic mannerisms of those whose lives are lived in the public eye, particularly if we are under twenty-five, as we have never known a world where it was not the normal thing to put a photo of yourself in a bikini on a website for all the world to see.
What kind of intimacy grows in the soil of public exposure, the compost of outward display? Call me a curmudgeon, but no one ever fell in deeply in love with someone because their photo was plastered all over the Internet, or because they were carrying a particular handbag --even the one they are photographed carrying in the photo posted on the Web .
Imagine a world without privacy: Your neighbors look through your windows, you are surveilled by the government, retail companies track all your preferences, your personal information is available online, and photos of you taken at different stages of your life are readily available on the Internet.
Some would say that is the definition of a political candidate, but it is not of them that I am thinking. Rather, it is of every one of us: more and more we give away all sorts of bits of information about ourselves without pausing to consider how doing so might eventually make less, rather than more, of our lives.
Take internet dating sites, which ask prospective users to supply answers to all sorts of questions of a personal nature, ranging from "Have you ever had sex with someone of your own gender?" to "Do you recycle?" The data is all voluntarily supplied with a view to matching up those with similar likes and dislikes and providing a template for projected compatibility.
Of course, there is no guarantee that the answers to the questions are any more true than the declarations of love of virtual partners. No doubt a social scientist will interject an objection to my skepticism here, averring that well-constructed surveys yield remarkably consistent evidence that certain types consistently prefer to be involved with people having similar characteristics, allowing room for a degree of individual manifestation of these characteristics. Romances can develop between people brought together specifically because they match for compatibility.
My own take is that 1. we live in an unromantic age, so romance is a rarity; 2. when it does happen, it does so because the two people enjoy an intuitive complicity that cannot be programmed for. Well-crafted questionnaires may be able to determine which people will share similar views on fundamental questions, but they don't generate that spark that used to be called love.
Romantic love, is of course, a concept that emerged in the waning of the Middle Ages: tales of a high-born married woman chastely courted by a virtuous knight propagated an ideal of intimate relations between men and women driven by the natural affinity of two persons, rather than dynastic ambitions. The ideal enjoyed centuries of popularity not just because it was nearly unattainable, but also because it enshrined the individuality of the two lovers, and the inimitable nature of their affections. Each great pair of lovers - Abelard and Heloise, Guinevere and Lancelot, Tristan and Iseult-- loves in their way, which is distinct from any of the others'.
Which makes that idealized romantic love, when it exists outside the literary sources from which it sprang, a way of differentiating ourselves from the common run of mere relationships of convenience. Students of romantic love in the groves of academe will agree that such love manifests itself only in the early stages of a relationship, and that unless there is a progression to a more practical level, the two individuals will drift apart. So even as we may initially love and lose ourselves in another, the continuance of the relationship requires acceptance of the mundane aspects of life together. These heighten our sense of being separate individuals with separate preferences, if most of the time we prefer what life together offers to life lived alone.
What that life together can offer is tenderness, mutual understanding and solidarity. In a world where privacy is less and less possible however, those aspects of love are challenged by competing claims: the drive for professional advancement and public recognition, the impulse towards public display of success; and the herd instinct that makes people of similar social or professional backgrounds follow similar trends in clothing, entertainment and transportation choices.
We are a consumer society and our relationships are built around consumption, which requires display. There is little inhibition about self-display left: other than sending around naked photos of oneself, no one thinks putting photos of themselves on social media sites is exhibitionism. Yet we are "celebritizing" ourselves by doing so, and adopting all the narcissistic mannerisms of those whose lives are lived in the public eye, particularly if we are under twenty-five, as we have never known a world where it was not the normal thing to put a photo of yourself in a bikini on a website for all the world to see.
What kind of intimacy grows in the soil of public exposure, the compost of outward display? Call me a curmudgeon, but no one ever fell in deeply in love with someone because their photo was plastered all over the Internet, or because they were carrying a particular handbag --even the one they are photographed carrying in the photo posted on the Web .
Saturday, November 2, 2013
The Private Self
All Soul's Day
The man who cuts my hair, a Russian barber, teases me about my mustache. I never thought it was that noticeable, but Vassily notices. He jokingly points out that I have one, never thinking that I would take offense, as I never do anything but laugh. He probably just thinks that its funny that I don't wax it, or have electrolysis to get rid of it. If I were an adolescent girl, I probably wouldn't find it so funny, and as he is the father of three, it makes me wonder what he teases them about.
It is for the most part, impossible to know how what we say strikes others. In Vassily's case, he would probably be deeply apologetic to he think he had offended me, as Vassily's pretty sensitive to slights himself. Not so the case of a partner at a Wall Street law firm I once worked for, who introduced a perky and efficient female associate to clients as "The Jessica Hahn of our firm", referencing the woman at the center of a 1987 sex scandal, when he meant (according to the associate) to compare her to Fawn Hall, Oliver North's loyal (if equally controversial) secretary.
The partner made the remark in front of clients, the associate and the senior associate on the transaction. The associate interpreted the remark in the best possible light, but the senior associate (who detested the partner) told other associate attorneys in the firm, who told others, revealing the partner (to those who did not already hold that opinion) to be an unredeemable boor. The associate had to accommodate herself to working with an insensitive boss if she wanted to remain at the firm.
For most of us who worked or work in the corporate world, being subject to insensitive bosses is part of the consideration exchanged in return for higher than average salaries. Not that less well-paid environments are necessarily gentler. The work place is a war zone, and luckily most of us can retreat to a refuge of choice at day's end. Our private self has a chance of being reconstituted there.
Yet for many of us that reconstitution is no escape from the isolation that characterizes the world we live in more than ever before. E.M. Forster summarized his moral imperative in two words: "Only connect" --but how many of us do connect with each other at any meaningful level?
This afternoon I went to hear "Two Boys", Nico Mulhy's opera about an Internet-addicted teenager driven to murder. The piece was both creepy and enormously subtle. "Everything's ironic, there's no tenderness", sings Inspector Strawson, referring to the tone of the exchanges in the chat rooms her suspect built his life around. I was sitting behind a retired teacher, and having taught at the secondary level myself, asked her whether the world depicted resonated with her experience.
"Oh, I retired from teaching thirty-five years ago, before there were computers in the classrooms", she said. "I will say that it seems that now the computer's the third parent, the most important one, so kids don't have to work at having relationships with their biological parents. And parents don't understand that the computer doesn't relieve them of the responsibility of knowing what is inside their kid's head."
Call it a dystopian view, but when face to face interaction pales in comparison to the thrill of being able to text in real time, how can the wellsprings of humanity not run dry? As most of us know, people write things to each other when they are using a Web-created vehicle --be it e-mail, a tweet or a chat-- they would not say to a person's face. The things said are more harsh, and more impulsively driven, with predictable consequences. Internet bullying has been legislated a crime in several states when teenagers killed themselves after being victimized by Internet-disseminated ridicule and abuse.
Community --it used to be a more felt presence in most of our lives. And it made sure the bully was stopped before he hurt someone vulnerable irreparably. The bully, in those days, was someone from a home where the parents were not good citizens. Today the bully can be --as "Two Boys" demonstrates-- a good student, one whose middle-class parents are glad he doesn't give them much to do, spending most of his hours in front of his computer, not interfering --or interacting-- with his progenitors.
In the old days before the Internet dominated our lives, the private self was inseparable from the community, in the sense that although the private self reached its fulfillment out of the reach of the public sphere, it defined itself in relation to it, yin, to the community's yang. What we have now is neither an inviolate private self, nor an inviolate community, just isolated individuals coming together in groups defined not by their broad reach, but by narrow, specific obsessions. It is a little like what happened to television once the networks' lost dominance to cable channels: Where once there was a more-or-less common television culture, now there are only segments. The individuation of preferences, the abundance of choice, has not necessarily produced an equally cohesive culture of community.
When I was a child, I would have preferred that my parents watch "Wonderful World of Disney" to Ed Sullivan, but I had a lot of company in my childish discontent. Today, I just walk out of my parents' viewing range, turn on the television in my room, and watch my program.
The man who cuts my hair, a Russian barber, teases me about my mustache. I never thought it was that noticeable, but Vassily notices. He jokingly points out that I have one, never thinking that I would take offense, as I never do anything but laugh. He probably just thinks that its funny that I don't wax it, or have electrolysis to get rid of it. If I were an adolescent girl, I probably wouldn't find it so funny, and as he is the father of three, it makes me wonder what he teases them about.
It is for the most part, impossible to know how what we say strikes others. In Vassily's case, he would probably be deeply apologetic to he think he had offended me, as Vassily's pretty sensitive to slights himself. Not so the case of a partner at a Wall Street law firm I once worked for, who introduced a perky and efficient female associate to clients as "The Jessica Hahn of our firm", referencing the woman at the center of a 1987 sex scandal, when he meant (according to the associate) to compare her to Fawn Hall, Oliver North's loyal (if equally controversial) secretary.
The partner made the remark in front of clients, the associate and the senior associate on the transaction. The associate interpreted the remark in the best possible light, but the senior associate (who detested the partner) told other associate attorneys in the firm, who told others, revealing the partner (to those who did not already hold that opinion) to be an unredeemable boor. The associate had to accommodate herself to working with an insensitive boss if she wanted to remain at the firm.
For most of us who worked or work in the corporate world, being subject to insensitive bosses is part of the consideration exchanged in return for higher than average salaries. Not that less well-paid environments are necessarily gentler. The work place is a war zone, and luckily most of us can retreat to a refuge of choice at day's end. Our private self has a chance of being reconstituted there.
Yet for many of us that reconstitution is no escape from the isolation that characterizes the world we live in more than ever before. E.M. Forster summarized his moral imperative in two words: "Only connect" --but how many of us do connect with each other at any meaningful level?
This afternoon I went to hear "Two Boys", Nico Mulhy's opera about an Internet-addicted teenager driven to murder. The piece was both creepy and enormously subtle. "Everything's ironic, there's no tenderness", sings Inspector Strawson, referring to the tone of the exchanges in the chat rooms her suspect built his life around. I was sitting behind a retired teacher, and having taught at the secondary level myself, asked her whether the world depicted resonated with her experience.
"Oh, I retired from teaching thirty-five years ago, before there were computers in the classrooms", she said. "I will say that it seems that now the computer's the third parent, the most important one, so kids don't have to work at having relationships with their biological parents. And parents don't understand that the computer doesn't relieve them of the responsibility of knowing what is inside their kid's head."
Call it a dystopian view, but when face to face interaction pales in comparison to the thrill of being able to text in real time, how can the wellsprings of humanity not run dry? As most of us know, people write things to each other when they are using a Web-created vehicle --be it e-mail, a tweet or a chat-- they would not say to a person's face. The things said are more harsh, and more impulsively driven, with predictable consequences. Internet bullying has been legislated a crime in several states when teenagers killed themselves after being victimized by Internet-disseminated ridicule and abuse.
Community --it used to be a more felt presence in most of our lives. And it made sure the bully was stopped before he hurt someone vulnerable irreparably. The bully, in those days, was someone from a home where the parents were not good citizens. Today the bully can be --as "Two Boys" demonstrates-- a good student, one whose middle-class parents are glad he doesn't give them much to do, spending most of his hours in front of his computer, not interfering --or interacting-- with his progenitors.
In the old days before the Internet dominated our lives, the private self was inseparable from the community, in the sense that although the private self reached its fulfillment out of the reach of the public sphere, it defined itself in relation to it, yin, to the community's yang. What we have now is neither an inviolate private self, nor an inviolate community, just isolated individuals coming together in groups defined not by their broad reach, but by narrow, specific obsessions. It is a little like what happened to television once the networks' lost dominance to cable channels: Where once there was a more-or-less common television culture, now there are only segments. The individuation of preferences, the abundance of choice, has not necessarily produced an equally cohesive culture of community.
When I was a child, I would have preferred that my parents watch "Wonderful World of Disney" to Ed Sullivan, but I had a lot of company in my childish discontent. Today, I just walk out of my parents' viewing range, turn on the television in my room, and watch my program.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Morning
We may sleep with someone, but our dreams are ours alone. When we can't sleep, we toss and turn, the prisoner of our anxieties.
Someone recently described sleep to me as their nourishment, every bit as important as food. The organism needs to be in "shut down" mode to boot up again. Anyone who has ever experienced a period of insomnia knows the feeling of dislocation sleep deprivation causes, as well as the relief brought by a good night's sleep.
This morning, the day after Halloween, New York City is bathed in warm rain, the temperatures higher than average. Unlike those sunny days that New York enjoys a good measure of, the cloudy days are moody, testing. New Yorkers don't appreciate how good the weather is here in a city on the same latitude as Madrid. The grey skies of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London (not to mention Scandinavian capitals) would make a joke of their complaints.
It is a luxury to be able to take in the rain outside my window, coffee in hand. What do we do when we face a rainy day and the quashing of plans to be outdoors on account of rain? We turn on the local news for news of the weather. As I write this, the voices emanating from my TV screen become the background music. Going out immediately is not an option, a mental adjustment is in order. Girding up for the wet, not letting the weather interrupt the agenda is a New York specialty. I have walked in blizzards, cycled in rainstorms, given a party during a hurricane. I am not unusual.
The consciousness I woke to still contained the memory of last night's dream: a dream of an empty room from which all the furniture had been removed. Vivid dreams are signs I have slept well, the dreams frequently more delightful than anything reality could produce. The memory of them evanesces quickly after rising though: perhaps it is nature's way of protecting us from an awareness of the gulf between what we hope for out of life and what life actually is.
Yet life as is actually is is the clay we have to work with so long as we have the energy to try to bend existence to our wills. So, out the door, dressed for the weather, I go. No news there.
Someone recently described sleep to me as their nourishment, every bit as important as food. The organism needs to be in "shut down" mode to boot up again. Anyone who has ever experienced a period of insomnia knows the feeling of dislocation sleep deprivation causes, as well as the relief brought by a good night's sleep.
This morning, the day after Halloween, New York City is bathed in warm rain, the temperatures higher than average. Unlike those sunny days that New York enjoys a good measure of, the cloudy days are moody, testing. New Yorkers don't appreciate how good the weather is here in a city on the same latitude as Madrid. The grey skies of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and London (not to mention Scandinavian capitals) would make a joke of their complaints.
It is a luxury to be able to take in the rain outside my window, coffee in hand. What do we do when we face a rainy day and the quashing of plans to be outdoors on account of rain? We turn on the local news for news of the weather. As I write this, the voices emanating from my TV screen become the background music. Going out immediately is not an option, a mental adjustment is in order. Girding up for the wet, not letting the weather interrupt the agenda is a New York specialty. I have walked in blizzards, cycled in rainstorms, given a party during a hurricane. I am not unusual.
The consciousness I woke to still contained the memory of last night's dream: a dream of an empty room from which all the furniture had been removed. Vivid dreams are signs I have slept well, the dreams frequently more delightful than anything reality could produce. The memory of them evanesces quickly after rising though: perhaps it is nature's way of protecting us from an awareness of the gulf between what we hope for out of life and what life actually is.
Yet life as is actually is is the clay we have to work with so long as we have the energy to try to bend existence to our wills. So, out the door, dressed for the weather, I go. No news there.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
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.
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.
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