“It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.”
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his reckoning with how to find your destiny. “Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” On the one hand, destiny is a ramshackle concept, trembling with reverberations of determinism and self-recusal from responsibility — we shape the path of our lives with our choices, often not knowing or not wanting to know that we are choosing with every action at every turn, then look back on the trail and call it destiny. On the other, some things in life seem indeed to choose us and not we them: our birth, to begin with; our talents; great love. Solitude may be one of those things — a life of solitude, whether it lasts a lifetime or a season of being, chooses the solitary as much as the solitary chooses it.
The theologian and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915–December 10, 1968) takes up the choice of solitude, its preconditions and its consequences, in a thirty-page essay titled “Notes for a Philosophy of a Solitude,” found in his 1960 collection Disputed Questions (public library) — a fine addition to the canon of great artists, writers, and scientists who have reaped and extolled the creative and spiritual rewards of solitude.
Clik here to view.
Merton defines the solitary as a person who undertakes “the lonely, barely comprehensible, incommunicable task of working his way through the darkness of his own mystery.” (A necessary note on the universal pronoun before you proceed.) To choose solitude or be chosen by it is “an arid, rugged purification of the heart,” “a quiet and humble refusal to accept the myths and fictions with which social life cannot help but be full,” a form of resistance to the “diversion” and “systematic distraction” our culture has designed to keep us from facing our mystery and our mortality. An epoch before social media, he observes:
The function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused.
[…]
The solitary is one who is called to make one of the most terrible decisions possible to man: the decision to disagree completely with those who imagine that the call to diversion and self-deception is the voice of truth and who can summon the full authority of their own prejudice to prove it.
Diversions, he notes, may be plainly absurd, such as the compulsion for status and the obsession with money, or they “may assume a hypocritical air of intense seriousness, for instance in a mass movement.” In a passage of extraordinary relevance today, he writes:
The break with the big group is compensated by enrollment in the little group. It is a flight not into solitude but into a protesting minority. Such a flight may be more or less honest, more or less honorable. Certainly it inspires the anger of those who believe themselves to be the “right thinking majority” and it necessarily comes in for its fair share of mockery on that account… [There is a] process of falsification and corruption which these groups almost always undergo. They abandon one illusion which is forced on everyone and substitute for it another, more esoteric illusion, of their own making. They have the satisfaction of making a choice, but not the fulfilment of having chosen reality.
The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary. He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.
Clik here to view.
There is a high price to pay for such renunciation of illusion:
[There are] sordid difficulties and uncertainties which attend the life of interior solitude… The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos… It cannot be otherwise: for in renouncing diversion, [the solitary] renounces the seemingly harmless pleasure of building a tight, self-contained illusion about himself and about his little world. He accepts the difficulty of facing the million things in his life which are incomprehensible, instead of simply ignoring them. Incidentally it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible. Otherwise, faith tends to be a kind of diversion, a spiritual amusement, in which one gathers up accepted, conventional formulas and arranges them in the approved mental patterns, without bothering to investigate their meaning, or asking if they have any practical consequences in one’s life.
Merton distills the reward on the other side of the renunciation:
Interior solitude… is the actualization of a faith in which a man takes responsibility for his own inner life.
It is interesting to read Merton — a deep thinker, but also a deeply religious thinker — as someone who believes that chance, not God, is the supreme creative agent of the universe; that the laws of nature, written in its native language of mathematics, are more sacred than any scripture; that we bless our own lives by being awake to the sheer wonder of existence. It is always salutary to engage with worldviews profoundly different from your own — it both expands and anneals your own sense of reality (reality being the thing that persists whether or not you believe in it) — until they open into something larger. In Merton’s faith, I find an invitation to self-transcendence that need not be religious, I find a poetics of the possible. And, as the teenage Sylvia Plath told her mother, “once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader.”
Clik here to view.
Merton considers the meaning of self-transcendence:
The true solitary is not one who simply withdraws from society. Mere withdrawal, regression, leads to a sick solitude, without meaning and without fruit. The solitary of whom I speak is called not to leave society but to transcend it.
[…]
If every society were ideal, then every society would help its members only to a fruitful and productive self-transcendence. But in fact societies tend to lift a man above himself only far enough to make him a useful and submissive instrument in whom the aspirations, lusts and needs of the group can function unhindered by too delicate a personal conscience. Social life tends to form and educate a man, but generally at the price of a simultaneous deformation and perversion. This is because civil society is never ideal, always a mixture of good and evil, and always tending to present the evil in itself as a form of good.
Such self-transcendence can be found only by quieting the din of social conditioning to hear one’s inner silence — that empty and receptive place where true solitude is found, a place so remote from the surface of being that even those determined to reach it are regularly derailed:
Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth.
[…]
One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society.
Clik here to view.
Merton admonishes against approaching solitude as another point of achievement to be worn as a badge on the lapel of the self in a society that fetishizes individualism. True solitude, rather — like love, like art — is an instrument of unselfing. He writes:
The price of fidelity in such a task is a completely dedicated humility — an emptiness of heart in which self-assertion has no place. For if he is not empty and undivided in his own inmost soul, the solitary will be nothing more than an individualist. And in that case, his non-conformity is nothing but an act of rebellion: the substitution of idols and illusions of his own choosing for those chosen by society. And this, of course, is the greatest of dangers… For to forget oneself, at least to the extent of preferring a social myth with a certain limited productiveness, is a lesser evil than clinging to a private myth which is only a sterile dream.
Noting that most people “cannot live fruitfully without a large proportion of fiction in their thinking,” he adds:
It is a vocation to become fully awake, even more than the common somnolence permits one to be, with its arbitrary selection of approved dreams, mixed with a few really valid and fruitful conceptions.
[…]
One who seeks to enter into this kind of solitude by affirming himself, and separating himself from others, and intensifying his awareness of his own individual being, is only travelling further and further away from it. But the one who has been found by solitude, and invited to enter it, and has entered freely, falls into the desert the way a ripe fruit falls out of a tree. It does not matter what kind of a desert it may be: in the midst of men or far from them. It is the one vast desert of emptiness which belongs to no one and to everyone.
In a sentiment evocative of Pablo Neruda’s magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Merton observes:
True solitude is not mere separateness. It tends only to unity. The true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them — all the more deeply because he is no longer entranced by marginal concerns. What he renounces is the superficial imagery and the trite symbolism that pretend to make the relationship more genuine and more fruitful.
[…]
One who is called to solitude is not called merely to imagine himself solitary, to live as if he were solitary, to cultivate the illusion that he is different, withdrawn and elevated. He is called to emptiness. And in this emptiness he does not find points upon which to base a contrast between himself and others. On the contrary, he realizes, though perhaps confusedly, that he has entered into a solitude that is really shared by everyone. It is not that he is solitary while everybody else is social: but that everyone is solitary, in a solitude masked by that symbolism which they use to cheat and counteract their solitariness.
What the solitary renounces is not connection, not community, but “the deceptive fictions and inadequate symbols which tend to take the place of genuine social unity.” Merton writes:
The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men, whether or not they are capable of realizing the tragedy of their plight.
Clik here to view.
Complement with Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor on solitude as contemplative and creative practice and poet May Sarton on the art of living alone, then revisit Merton’s magnificent letter to Rachel Carson (which is how I first became acquainted with his mind) about civilizational self-awareness and the measure of wisdom.
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
newsletter
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.