How to Be Alone (School of Life) (5 page)

Edinburgh New Town employed classical architecture to represent the city’s rational, civilized, democratic and free society.

She had not been withstanding them on selfish principles alone, she had not consulted merely her own gratification … no, she had attended to what was due to others,
and to her own character in their opinion.

(Chapter 13, my italics)

For all the era’s emphasis on civility, tolerance and liberty, most Enlightenment writers despised solitude, finding it both repellent and immoral. Edward Gibbon, author of the famous
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776–88), wrote:

There is perhaps no phase in the moral history of mankind of a deeper or more painful interest than this ascetic epidemic. A hideous, distorted and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, spending his life in a routine of useless and atrocious self-torture … had become the ideal of nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato.

James Wilson was even blunter:

An ascetic monk or ‘self-secluded man’, possibly a sulky egotistical fellow, who could not accommodate himself to the customs of his fellow creatures. Such beings do very well to write sonnets about now that they are (as we sincerely trust) all dead and buried, but the reader may depend upon it, they were a vile pack.

Sad, mad and bad, in fact!

By the very end of the eighteenth century, however, a new mood began to cut across the refined elegance of neoclassical enlightenment. Ideas of freedom and ‘rights’ began to conflict with the civic-and social-minded atmosphere; the careful public performance of mannerliness felt restrictive and a sort of anti-Enlightenment developed surprisingly fast into the Romantic movement. Like neoclassicism, it came with both philosophical and aesthetic baggage. Some of the principle ideas included:

The elevation of emotion over reason and of the senses over the intellect.

Introspection and the legitimate engagement with the self; a sort of heightened awareness of one’s own moods and thoughts.

A construction of the artist as a free creative spirit.

An emphasis on imagination and spontaneity as a way to spiritual truth.

A heightened appreciation of the beauty of nature, particularly in its most sublime and awe-inspiring aspects.

With such a set of concepts it is not surprising that would-be artists had somehow to escape from the coils of social convention and slip back into primal innocence so that they could access their deepest emotions and find their own individual ‘voice’. Suddenly there was a plethora of writers praising the value of being alone. William Wordsworth articulated this more explicitly than most in his poem ‘The Prelude’:

When from our better selves we have too long

Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,

Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,

How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.

In a way, this Romantic vision could almost be seen as a return to the early Christian paradigm: the authentic inner self, or true soul, is obscured and weakened by too much worldliness and corrupting materialism. The person desiring perfection must flee into the desert and nurture the inner life in solitude. The difference is, of course, that the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the ego as quasi-divine.

Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this idea extended its reach. Originally it had been understood as a route for ‘geniuses’, for especially endowed talents, but gradually, as this set of ideas met with wider ideas of equality and human rights,
everyone
became a genius.

This might well have led to a renewal of the values of solitude, but in fact it had, as we know, the opposite effect. This was partly because the concept of freedom and rights had other important dimensions – and many of those required collective actions; among them widening the vote, the trade-union movement, the various campaigns for national freedom (Byron, the great Romantic hero, died in the war to liberate Greece), the struggle against slavery and the two activist phases of the women’s liberation movement. These necessarily pulled people into social association and demonstrated the power and effectiveness of collective engagement.

At the same time a general improvement in health, the enormous stresses of increasingly alienated labour and a lowering of inhibition about sex made personal relationships a more important source of pleasure and personal fulfilment. The theme of sexual and emotional satisfaction was picked up as a central issue in the early psychoanalytic movement, so that solitude began to seem not only impossibly difficult but also unhealthy.

Throughout the twentieth century the conflict in values continued. In one sense you could argue that the present model – which emphasizes ‘fulfilment’ as a ‘human right’, by widening (but thinning) one’s social environment, while seeking the individual good (rather than the communal good) within it – was a clever compromise. But because this model is so brittle, it is inevitably defensive and particularly punitive towards anything that tries to challenge it.

This almost absurdly brisk canter through some elementary history of European cultural paradigms reveals, I hope, a sort of pendulum swinging between various options for understanding the good life; and in all them the question of solitude – both of our psychological capacity and of our ethical obligations to be alone – has been key to the understanding of society and identity. As we came to the beginning of a new millennium, the pendulum was reaching an extreme outer limit of its range, in favour of relationality and social life. This has perhaps been obscured by the cult of individualism, which has, rather oddly, developed simultaneously.

This situation is increasingly fragile. The global financial crisis has raised massive questions about the sustainability of consumerist capitalism based on perpetual economic growth; the language of human rights appears to have delivered just about all the benefits (and they were real and substantial) that it can; people, at least in the developed world, are losing commitment to participatory democracy and to liberal religious faith; and the eco-scientists are showing us with increasing clarity just how tenuous the whole life-as-we-know-it project is becoming. To go back to Rome, the barbarians are at the gate. In these circumstances solitude is threatening – without a common and embedded religious faith to give shared meaning to the choice, being alone is a challenge to the security of those clinging desperately to a sinking raft. People who pull out and ‘go solo’ are exposing the danger while apparently escaping the engagement.

No wonder we are frightened of those who desire and aspire to be alone, if only a little more than has been acceptable in recent social forms. No wonder we want to establish solitude as ‘sad, mad and bad’ – consciously or unconsciously, those of us who want to do something so markedly countercultural are exposing, and even widening, the rift lines.

But the truth is, the present paradigm is not really working. Despite the intense care and attention lavished on the individual ego; despite over a century of trying to ‘raise self-esteem’ in the peculiar belief that it will simultaneously enhance individuality and create good citizens; despite valiant attempts to consolidate relationships and lower inhibitions; despite intimidating efforts to dragoon the more independent-minded and creative to become ‘team players’; despite the promises of personal freedom made to us by neoliberalism and the cult of individualism and rights – despite all this, the well seems to be running dry. We are living in a society marked by unhappy children, alienated youth, politically disengaged adults, stultifying consumerism, escalating inequality, deeply scary wobbles in the whole economic system, soaring rates of mental ill-health and a planet so damaged that we may well end up destroying the whole enterprise.

Of course we also live in a world of great beauty, sacrificial and passionate love, tenderness, prosperity, courage and joy. But quite a lot of all that seems to happen regardless of the paradigm and the high thoughts of philosophy. It has always happened. It is precisely because it has always happened that we go on wrestling with these issues in the hope that it can happen more often and for more people.

III. Rebalancing Attitudes to Solitude

If there is any credibility at all to the somewhat gloomy analysis with which I finished the previous section (and obviously I believe there is), then there is a serious problem confronting us, at least in the developed world. We have arrived at a cultural moment when we are terrified of something that we are not reliably, or healthily, able to evade. Solitude can happen to anyone: we are all at risk. There is no number of friends on Facebook, contacts, connections or financial provision that can guarantee to protect us. The largest, and fastest-growing, groups of people living alone are women over seventy-five (bereavement creates solitude) and men between twenty-five and forty-five (the breakdown of intimate relationships creates solitude). Most often, solitude catches people on the hop, as it were, and few of us can feel we will be securely and indefinitely supported by family, neighbourhood, community or even friendship. It is not sustainable to live in defensive postures of fear and avoidance all the time.

The two most common tactics for evading the terror of solitude are both singularly ineffective. The first is denigrating those who do not fear it, especially if they claim to enjoy it, and stereotyping them as ‘miserable’, ‘selfish’, ‘crazy’ or ‘perverse’ (sad, mad and bad). The second is infinitely extending our social contacts as a sort of insurance policy, which social media makes increasingly possible.

The first is ineffective because of the risk that a whole range of circumstances may force someone into solitude involuntarily. Should this happen, the fear-and-projection strategy will turn round and bite back:
you
will be the sad, mad, bad person, and this can only make a difficult situation very much worse. Additionally, since – as you will see – there is a good deal of evidence that none of these worries are actually true, people pursuing this route will be obliged to cut themselves off from many ways of knowing about the actual world in which they are living. This itself may well prove isolating: one of the problems with projected fears is that they do tend to make the scary thing or event more likely, rather than less likely, to occur.

The problems with the second option are more complex. In the first place, online social life necessarily entails disembodied relationships. Yet we are a culture that places an extremely high value on sexual and other physical relationships. We understand the limits of language and have an awareness of how much information is carried by non-linguistic communication – by body language, expression and ‘tone’. Relationships without these elements are necessarily partial.

Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University, argues that there is a neurological limit to the number of people that most human brains have a capacity to perceive as fully developed, complex individuals. Dunbar fixes the number at 150. Michael Hibbert, who claims to have the most Facebook friends in the world, has 8,924. This must, at the very least, change the meaning of the word ‘friend’.

In fairness, I should point out that not everyone agrees with me here. There are other reasons for using social media than to generate a plethora of ‘thin’ relationships.

My friend Anne Wareham the garden writer – someone who definitely knows how to be alone and often is – believes that the New Media creates real communities of choice:

When we first came to live in the countryside we knew no one. We spent some lonely years building up friendships and those rarely with really like-minded people. And old friends were more difficult to see.

That really was solitude and I remember my frantic efforts to get online when I first heard of the Internet and when it wouldn’t have offered much anyway – no one there.

But they are there now, and social media introduces you to people around the whole wide world. With Twitter I have met people who share my particular preoccupation with being serious about serious gardens and they are rare – but if you have the world to search you can find like-minded people and they find you. This has also enabled a lively dialogue on the website I edit,
www.thinkingardens.co.uk.

For someone like me, who values solitude, it’s ideal. I can manage my time and manage my contact with the world, and give real time and effort where and when I choose.

Now I am conscious that my mother-in-law might perhaps need institutional care one day. She is computer literate and therefore of a generation which may no longer find themselves in the isolation of an institution full of people with nothing in common but age – because they will have the freedom of the web.

It’s all an enormous luxury and freedom.

Nonetheless I believe our fear of solitude is real and is in many ways disabling. I do not believe that running away from this reality is effective, protective or even socially beneficial.

So what follows are ideas for overturning negative views of solitude and developing a positive sense of aloneness and a true capacity to enjoy it. It is not progressive – you do not have to do the various exercises in the order I am offering them, but I do suggest that you start with number 1. I recommend starting with the exercises that feel as though they make the most obvious sense to you, and which do not seem too stressful.

Although, as I have said, this programme is not progressive, it is cumulative. Like all learning experiences, you need a combination of theory and practice, so I have tried in the pages that follow to alternate ideas that might strengthen your desire for and reduce your fear of solitude with ways in which you might, in practice, develop your taste for and skill at it.