THE CALL OF SOLITUDE: Alonetime in a World of Attachment. <i> By Ester Schaler Buchholz</i> . <i> Simon & Schuster: 366 pp., $24</i> : PRIVATE MATTERS: In Defense of the Personal Life. <i> By Janna Malamud Smith</i> . <i> Addison-Wesley: 278 pp., $22</i>
I
Solitude has traditionally been, in the West, the state in which men and women have sought in inwardness an encounter with God or truth. It is a rite of spiritual or intellectual passage that for those who seek it out never ceases; it leads always onward but has no end. It is rarely solitary, for it is crowded with presences: with memories, loves, dead comrades, ideas, visions or with events and encounters that occur in a terrain that has rarely been adequately described. It is a drama, a struggle in which, once it is encountered and fully felt, is likely to become, in Meister Eckhart’s phrase, a “burning desert,” defined by God’s absence, a place where the heart breaks, or a place filled with the siren call of absolutes and madness that so beguiled Nietzsche. It is not restful; it rarely produces health; it sometimes leads to beauty, wisdom or truth, and the happiness and peace it occasionally provides are incidental, not unlike an explorer’s reflective satisfaction between journeys.
It is in solitude and its various forms--contemplation, say, or reflection, or reason, or Immanuel Kant’s “speculative knowledge”--that has traditionally provided us with what we know or think when we consider not only God and truth, but also meaning, justice or the countless other abstractions and ideas by which we order our lives. This tradition of solitude is comparable, though not identical, to Eastern meditative tradition. The purpose and the phenomena encountered are not the same; the regions of inwardness entered differ. Nonetheless the fruits and gifts of solitude and inwardness are of decisive spiritual, cultural and intellectual significance for all of us. The traditional canon, the texts that most reveal or determine what we are, has been marked from the pre-Socratic Greeks onward (at least up through Georg Hegel) by thinkers, mystics, writers and artists who encountered in solitude and in its various modes can be found nowhere else in experience.
Kant, for instance, argued that reason, when applied to moral questions, led in inwardness to certain inevitable ideas and that these in fact await the thinker; they are so inescapably a part of inner life that reason can lead nowhere else. Hegel argued that reason was, in itself, the truth that thinking seeks; in using it to question and pass beyond all that has already been thought, we participate in the natural activity of spirit and therefore approach the truth only when we reason. Were I to sum up here my own beliefs, I would say that something akin to truth only yields itself to a particular kind of contemplative inwardness, one that in good faith or with good will seeks only truth. In this sense, truth is not a final point or conclusion to be reached but a particular kind of inward or subjective territory we can enter only through open-mindedness, humility, a capacity for uncertainty and a readiness to be confounded or transformed by what we find.
This tradition, or even the basic underlying idea that subjectivity yields truths of immense and incomparable significance, is under attack from many quarters. Its antagonists include those who see brain-mind subjectivity as a byproduct of the behavior of subatomic particles or chemical and physical processes; those who insist culture is defined and directed mainly by genes in their unreachable implacability; those who equate what computers can or will do with the mysteries of human subjectivity; those who expand Marx’s notion of conditioned consciousness into a condemnation of all reflective thoughts as arbitrary, idiosyncratic and self-delusional; and those who advocate contemporary therapies or theories of the psyche that treat thought and contemplative seeking as the least significant of human behaviors.
One problem is that solitude has not received the attention it deserves. Those who therefore seek something--the philosophers, for example, or the mystics--are not particularly outspoken or self-revealing when it comes to what it means or how it feels to ponder, think or contemplate in solitude. Hence, there remains at the heart of our understanding of solitude a rather troublesome silence, a void that renders it more of a mystery than it ought to be.
Periodically, of course, someone comes along and tries to deal with the subject. More often than not, these are practitioners of meditation who describe the Eastern rather than the Western forms of experience. But sometimes others take a stab at it. Ester Schaler Buchholz’s “The Call of Solitude” and Janna Malamud Smith’s “Private Matters” are about solitude. Buchholz has written a guide; Smith, a look at privacy in which solitude is the most “extreme” and restorative form. Both writers are concerned, then, with aspects of precisely the kind of human inwardness that ought to get far more attention than they do. They touch upon human experiences and possibilities that are in danger of being momentarily lost from view or closed off to those who might find within them genuine and transformative value.
The problem is that neither book is equal in seriousness and complexity to the seriousness and complexity of their subjects. Their authors have been trained in psychology. Buchholz teaches and practices psychiatry; Smith is a psychotherapist; they bring to their work the language, categories, attitudes and ideas that dominate their disciplines; but these, alas, are by no means sufficient to illuminate the complexities of and mysteriousness of human inwardness.
Both authors have tried to write popular books. They mimic and echo, as if by intention, the flaws and faults of most therapeutic self-help books flooding the pop-psychology sections in bookstores. They veer repeatedly from oversimplification into inanities and sloganeering; they attempt to describe the psyche and explain experience and make assertions about the causes and remedies of human angst that do not do justice to their subject; and they both seem peculiarly blind to their own content: the complicated innerness of solitude and privacy. Because Buchholz and Smith are psychologists, they approach inwardness only in terms of “cure,” “health” and “wholeness,” and neither of them seems to understand, or to have experienced in any first-hand way, what has traditionally drawn men and women into solitude or privacy and what they have found there.
II
Buchholz is particularly flawed in all of these respects. To demonstrate her thesis that solitude, what she calls “alonetime,” is the great lost key to human happiness and healing, she uses as points of reference the lives and work of innumerable writers, artists, musicians and thinkers. But she seems to understand nothing of their work and to have wrestled with none of their thoughts. She takes all they have done or said and tries to squeeze or twist it into the narrow confines of her insistent thesis.
She writes: “Alonetime is a great protector of the self and the human spirit. Many in society have railed against it. Some have overused its healing potential. Others have kept it as a special resource. . . . [Yet] the only way we shall achieve . . . ideal love is if we are allowed to flower in the due course of our inner life. Whether or not we were fortunate in our growing up . . . plenty of time--alonetime--awaits us now to make the necessary adjustments.”
There you have it: cliche piled upon cliche, a language that approaches gibberish and a sort of greed for attention or success that apparently allows her, like an untrustworthy suitor, to promise whatever she thinks the reader wants.
When considering Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter, she writes: “In different versions of ‘The Scream’ . . . one sees the ability of friends to ignore . . . another’s desperation. But Munch painted hundreds more pictures than that one, including images of love, and found a way to clarify life’s meaning through his alone struggles.”
But Munch was quite precise in describing the anguished epiphany that gives rise to “The Scream,” and it had far more to do with the kinds of nothingness about which Jean-Paul Sartre or Martin Heidegger wrote than with contemporary American notions of intimacy or alonetime. The central drama of Munch’s life had to do with death. His mother--Buchholz points this out--died when he was young; he learned early on the power of death to destroy all order, all pleasure, all love. When he managed, finally, to move beyond his anguish, it was through a kind of nature-mysticism, a combination of paganism and retooled Christianity. It was only in God that he managed to locate a power equal to death--in self, not in intimacy, not in alonetime.
Beyond all else, Buchholz reveals her inability to understand religious impulse. Here she is on Thomas Merton: “Merton chose a solitary [life] believing that was the only way a person became aware that alonetime is undeniable. Yet Merton found his vocation and identity when he discovered, in recuperation, after an illness, the benefits of extended rest.”
That’s it, word for word. But what can it mean? Vocation as vacation? I am as secular as a man can be, but even I know something of the anguish, the depths of longing, the great cry rising out of the human heart for redemption or salvation, that drives men from the distractions of the world and into a silence where, perhaps, there can be heard a whisper emanating from what might be God.
I remember meeting Merton in the late’60s at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. It was a year or less before his death. He was a man burnished by contemplation. He seemed to glow. But in privacy and solitude, he struggled ceaselessly with his own ego, vanity and need for attention. His solitude, like the solitude of countless other monks or contemplatives, had nothing to do with rest. It meant labor and discipline and the unending task of trying to leave behind the terrors and appetites that separate the yearning self from God.
Similarly, the same restlessness and yearning that drew Merton through struggle toward God has led other, more secular men and women through struggle toward senses of truth or the Good and what these demand of us. In their cases, as in Merton’s, the inner regions entered meant strife rather than peace, risk as well as grace; they led through long periods of darkness before any sort of light appeared. Solitude, in fact, stands in the same relation to what occurs within it as does a border crossing to a wild and unexplored country; it is merely a point of departure, and it promises nothing in particular--certainly not the casual bliss Buchholz is recommending to her readers.
III
Janna Malamud Smith’s “Private Matters” is ostensibly about privacy rather than solitude, but she keeps coming back to solitude as the most extreme and restorative form of privacy, and she, like Buchholz, recommends it mainly for its healing powers.
Smith writes a bit more gracefully than Buchholz does. She is less ambitious in her aims and therefore does somewhat less violence to experience. But she shares with Buchholz a weakness for sentimental sloganeering and uses rather meaningless language. She too seems to know little about the content of solitude. Privacy is understandable for Smith mainly in terms of secrecy. It is where one can relax, rest, “be oneself” and feel free from prying others or keep to oneself one’s most private secrets.
This is, of course, one possible approach to privacy, and to solitude as well. But it is a limited one, for it defines privacy in purely negative and external terms: in terms of what it is not, (i.e., not public life) and in terms of what is not present in it (i.e., prying others). But there is another way of understanding privacy and solitude: in positive and interior terms, in terms of unmediated, direct, and therefore private, connections that people establish to either their outer or inner worlds. One can think, in this regard, not only of contemplatives or mystics withdrawn from the world but also of solitary surfers on the ocean at dawn, or climbers who tackle peaks alone. These differing forms of passion have this in common: They not only permit, but also arise from, so direct a relation to experience that a privacy is created. Prying others are not only absent but are also superfluous; their judgments, their opinions, even their prying, are rendered irrelevant.
Smith, I fear, is as blind to this aspect of privacy as Buchholz is to the spirit. She seems to know nothing of what goes on inside privacy; nor does she understand the endless dialogue that often goes on within the self between reason and inclination. She describes to us what she takes to be the very heart of Freud’s theories of analysis, the sharing of secrets:
“People . . . get better after saying what they are forbidden to say . . . because speaking to a receptive listener is relieving . . . [and] they have created a new perspective by structuring . . . inchoate feeling with words.”
And she writes again, more giddily: “Imagine how embarrassing, exciting, liberating and strange it must have felt to . . . give voice to the improper feelings you had assiduously kept to yourself.”
But this entirely misses the point of Freud’s technique. What mattered to Freud was not speech but understanding; speech was necessary not because it revealed the truth but because it might, inadvertently, reveal what remained hidden and unsaid. The act of speaking was merely the first or last step in the patient’s struggle to reclaim the energy required to hide (from himself or herself) the truths of his own experience. Speaking certainly was not enough; even self-revelation could be used, as Wilhelm Reich pointed out, as a defense against change. “Know thyself” is the proper phrase for what Freud was after, not “share thyself.”
Smith mentions once, almost idly, that some people use solitude “to become closer to God or holiness.” But she chooses to sum up solitude in this way: “A person seeking solitude separates from others so she cannot be seen or heard. . . . In solitude, as opposed to other states of privacy, she is most free to relax her body.”
Here, precisely, Smith makes the same error that Buchholz makes. Because solitude sometimes produces peace or ease, she presumes that this is its function. She assumes that is why people seek it out or what they find in it. She writes: “The essence of solitude, and all privacy, is a sense of order and control.”
But is it? Think of Munch and Merton, or of Leo Tolstoy, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and Rilke or of Emily Dickinson, Simone Weil and Sylvia Plath. The essence of their individual solitudes, or of solitude in general--if it has an essence--has little to do with what we think of as control or choice. One learns that there are vast regions within the self or available to the self that seem to lie outside the self, inimical to all will, choice or control. They have an order of their own and an apparently objective intractability equal to what one finds in the material world. We need not, prematurely, elevate the experience of such territories to the status of the divine. Mathematicians have this experience with numbers. Kant reported it in relation to “the moral universe within.” Plato’s discussion of “the Forms” or “Ideas” refers to the sense of order and meaning, seemingly ineluctable, he came upon in contemplation, and for Freud such experience occurred in the shadowy regions of the psyche that reason could explore but not rule.
How we ought to think of this, of what occurs “only in the mind,” is not clear. We still do not really know what status to grant these experiences. But as experiences, they clearly involve both terror and joy; they dissolve all previous certainty; they teach ego, self and will that there are limits to our powers, even inside, even alone. They teach us, in short, precisely the kinds of humility that make it impossible to believe--as do Buchholz and Smith--that we can fully understand or explain the mysteries we present to ourselves.
IV
Aquinas wrote late in life, after his first and only mystical experience, “All I have written is as straw.” This is something one neither chooses nor controls. When it comes, it comes as a terrible boon, a frightening gift. In a sense, it chooses us, and it is this, I suppose, that is the “essence” of solitude.
If Buchholz and Smith do not understand this, or in fact very much about solitude at all, their books may in the end serve at least one unintended purpose. Perhaps they are the literary equivalents to the false corridors and dead-end chambers the pharaohs built long ago into their pyramid-tombs: They lead absolutely nowhere, but they preserve for those willing to laboriously seek them out the true riches of inner life.
Certainly, even now, one can find on the shelves of any bookstore enough texts to provide a genuine indication of what solitude really is. Think for instance, of the poetry of Rilke and Dickinson, of Thoreau’s essays, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Reveries of a Solitary Walker,” or Eckhart’s sermons or Descartes’ “Meditations” or Plato’s “Phaedo” or Hume’s musings at the end of his “First Treatise” or other works of Kant and Hegel on reason or of the late essays of Heidegger, who despite his politics may have known more about thinking as an experience than any other modern philosopher. I have named these writers and philosophers as a way of pointing out that although it is ignored, there remains among us, still, a tradition of Western solitude and inwardness upon which we can draw and which we are obligated to continue.
Just the other day, at a concert, I heard a performance of Bach’s “Magnificat in D Major.” In the architectonic spaces defined by the music and intended to reflect God’s grandeur, I heard and inwardly entered the same spaces where thought sometimes goes and where one discovers a joy and freedom as extraordinary as anything found among life’s great pleasures. It is this joy, this sense of passionate aliveness, this sense of something existing beyond the self, yet accessible only within the self, that Buchholz, Smith and many others do not seem to understand. But it exists, and it endlessly beckons us toward it in the way that all great loves attract us: not as a means to health or wholeness but because we hunger for all that is hidden there and for the truths contained within it.