The Search for Solitude : Long a Western Ideal, True Isolation Poses a Seductive Allure--and May Hold Pure Terror

Without doubt he fit the part of the hermit: haunted eyes, hair an unholy mess, wardrobe a casualty of Richard Nixon’s shredding machine. He dined on parsnips and once ran into trouble for roasting a coyote. He had no heat, no running water and of course no phone.

The very sight of Ted Kaczynski emerging from his hut in the wilds of Montana had to give pause to would-be isolationists--a category that sometimes seems to include much of Western civilization--and pose fascinating questions about the quality of solitude.

True reclusiveness (the proverbial escape to a desert island) poses a powerful, seductive allure, yet at the same time pure isolation also holds terror. Psychology, after all, virtually defines mental well-being as the ability to interact with others. Ergo, passionate, self-imposed isolation becomes a close cousin of, at the very least, eccentricity--possibly, true madness.

American writers have long obsessed about the essence of aloneness, and social scientists have put solitude under a microscope. The military frets about the consequences of isolation in deserts or on polar ice caps, and mothers of unpartnered adults worry that sons or daughters will spend eternity--shudder!--alone. Even so, whether it means retreating to a den, fleeing on a solo vacation or merely eating breakfast alone, many people at one point or another simply Want to Be Alone.

Thus it was that the unkempt loner who greeted the world as the suspected Unabomber rattled some cherished notions about the solitary life. Was the Kaczynski who was led away in handcuffs the poster boy for America’s noble and proud tradition of rugged individualism--a quality extolled again and again in this country’s lore and literature? Or was he confirmation of the lunacy of such notions?

With his rambling dissertation about the outdoors and ode to “WILD nature,” the suspected bomber clearly qualified as one of the most long-winded nature writers of all time. His ponderous meditations had a vague familiarity as well. Was his odd-man-out existence the Thoreauvian ideal come to life? It was easy to reflect on such quotidian profundities as Ted Kaczynski made his way into the klieg lights.

North Americans in particular harbor an intense affection for the idea of solitary exploration of wide open spaces. It’s the pioneer spirit, deeply ingrained in a technocratic culture. It’s what Steinbeck called “westering,” or what, earlier, Huck Finn called “lighting out for the territory where things aren’t cramped and smothery.”

But ambivalence nags: There are no fax machines out there in the wilderness, no modem connections, no manicurists. And if you run into an actual American hermit, will he invite you in for barbecued grizzly and a chat about the universe, or will he summarily hack you to death?

“The pastoral ideal is the great Utopian dream that we all dream at the core of our hearts,” commented USC professor Ronald Gottesman, who this fall is introducing a course in nature writing. “It’s where Hemingway goes for solace in ‘Big Two-Hearted River.’ But when he goes there, he discovers nature not only has bubbling brooks but also swamps without any bottoms.”

There are other drawbacks for the hermit-as-hero, said Gottesman’s colleague, USC professor Tom Gustafson. “The one thing I tell my students about Huck Finn: Whenever he goes off into nature by himself, he’s dreadfully lonely. The word ‘loneliness’ keeps coming up and up.”

Robert Hogan, a University of Tulsa psychologist, has studied humans in isolation, men and women who are characteristically introverted. “They actually like to spend time alone,” Hogan explained, revealing a conclusion that sounds less obvious when you think how anxious it made you to sit by yourself for 26 minutes the last time your luncheon partner was stuck in traffic. Friends of the tundra turn out to display a low need for excitement or stimulation. On the flip side, folks who think it’s fun to hang out in igloos show a remarkably high tolerance for boredom.

Hogan has identified another species of loner: Ill-prepared and usually unskilled, these erstwhile loners tend to have poor track records as isolationists. The saga of one such soul, “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer (Villard Books, 1996), details the trek of Emory University graduate Chris McCandless, who donated his ample life savings to charity and set forth for the Alaskan frontier--where his body was found by moose hunters on a remote mining trail. As evidence of just how fascinating such tales remain, “Into the Wild” spent a comfortable sojourn on national bestseller lists.

In real-life isolation, Hogan said such dream-chasers “turn out to be real problems.” They arrive in remote, solitary research stations and promptly go “completely nuts.”

“They start wandering off into the snow, drinking way, way too much,” he said. “The Navy has a lot of data about this, but they don’t like to talk about it, how they get guys assaulting colleagues with an axe when they show up to help them. In the military, they’re very hush-hush about this.”

By contrast, Hogan said some personality types (Henry David Thoreau, perhaps) genuinely are happy setting up shop alone, in the middle of nowhere. Most likely, these latter-day cenobites have been “pathologically shy” since birth. “These people do not find social interaction rewarding,” he observed. “Even when they’re babies, they aren’t much fun to hold, since they refuse to be cuddly.”

For most people, the intervals between social contacts would be measured in days or weeks--not months or years, said another specialist in human isolation, Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia. “Absolute, prolonged isolation is pretty rare,” Suedfeld said. But serial solitude--breaks of various duration, such as pioneer camping or a few days now and then at the local convent or monastery--claims its origins in another well-established North American practice.

“The North American native Indians did that,” Suedfeld said. “It was called a spirit quest,” a coming-of-age expedition in which young members of a tribe would separate from the group and stay alone, usually without provisions, until a transcendent experience took place.

These days, the spirit quest is not always so successful. Suedfeld recalled how a writer recently convinced the Canadian government to let him work at an isolated research station in the high Arctic. He arrived in mid-winter, insistent that he was a self-reliant fellow who could handle any adversity that might drift his way. When a team of Suedfeld’s researchers arrived to check in on him, they found the writer nearly dead. He never had figured out how to hook up the diesel heater and was cooking a tub of rubber boots for a combination of heat and food.

“North Americans have this pioneer tradition--we think we can handle anything,” Suedfeld said. “But our ignorance overwhelms us. We think food comes from the grocery store and heat comes from the heater.”

Yet novelist Alix Kates Shulman maintains that she had no such delusions 15 years ago when she began spending half the year on a rocky island in Maine, determined to find the solitude she believed would help her to write. She was blocked on a novel in progress, turning 50 and watching her marriage shred to pieces.

Free of social pressures, free of the competitive creativity that often besets the literati--free even of her hair dryer--Shulman felt fueled by her own independence. (“Drinking the Rain,” Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995, describes her time on the island.) Many of her friends and family members, however, figured she had lost her mind.

“They assumed that going off and being alone and enjoying it was itself nuts,” Shulman said. “All I can tell you is that I never felt saner in my life. It was like my little private joke on my friends, who just assumed through some preconception or cliche about solitude that this was a crazy thing to do. It was the opposite. I went off to find out what I would do if I was alone. And I discovered a world and a self.”