“These are the occasions in life — when nothing occurs — however in quietness the soul expands,” the artist Rockwell Kent wrote as he was discovering himself on the solitary shores of Alaska, considering the relationship between wilderness, solitude, and creativity whereas immersed within the writings of the Transcendentalist thinker and poet Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817–Might 6, 1862).
Since its publication on August 9, 1854, Thoreau’s Walden (public library | public domain) has gone on to encourage generations with its purehearted ethos, its prayerful ardour for the dwelling world, and its singular lens on how human nature is annealed by communion with the remainder of nature.
In one of many boldest and most shimmering passages in all of literature, Thoreau writes:
I went to the woods as a result of I needed to stay intentionally, to entrance solely the important info of life, and see if I couldn’t be taught what it needed to train, and never, once I got here to die, uncover that I had not lived.
Solitary by nature, Thoreau let solitude nurture him within the cabin he constructed for a complete of $28.12½ on the shore of a small lake in New England, the place his nearest neighbor was a mile away and all about he might see solely hilltops. He writes:
It’s as solitary the place I stay as on the prairies. It’s as a lot Asia or Africa as New England. I’ve, because it had been, my very own solar and moon and stars, and slightly world all to myself.
[…]
I discover it healthful to be alone the larger a part of the time. To be in firm, even with one of the best, is quickly wearisome and dissipating. I like to be alone. I by no means discovered the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We’re for probably the most half extra lonely once we go [out among others] than once we keep in our chambers.
Practically a century later, Rilke channeled the underlying elemental fact in his observing that “there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear” as he reckoned with the relationship between solitude, intimacy, and creativity, concluding: “Individuals are drawn to the straightforward and to the simplest facet of the straightforward. However it’s clear that we should maintain ourselves to the troublesome.”
And but on the opposite facet of the troublesome, as soon as we stop attempting to manage life out of loneliness and as a substitute give up to the fundamental solitude — there lies an ease with an fringe of ecstasy. That’s what Thoreau found at Walden. In one of the vital transcendent passages from the e-book — an beautiful specimen of the unphotographable — he writes below the heading “Solitude”:
It is a scrumptious night, when the entire physique is one sense, and imbibes delight by each pore. I’m going and include a wierd liberty in Nature, part of herself. As I stroll alongside the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, although it’s cool in addition to cloudy and windy, and I see nothing particular to draw me, all the weather are unusually congenial to me. The bullfrogs trump to usher within the night time, and the word of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves virtually takes away my breath; but, just like the lake, my serenity is rippled however not ruffled.
[…]
There may be generally enough house about us. Our horizon is rarely fairly at our elbows. The thick wooden isn’t just at our door, nor the pond, however considerably is at all times clearing, acquainted and worn by us, appropriated and fenced in a roundabout way, and reclaimed from Nature. For what cause have I this huge vary and circuit, some sq. miles of unfrequented forest, for my privateness, deserted to me by males?
Two generations later, Hermann Hesse would arrive at his personal reply, which may be the common reply: “Solitude shouldn’t be chosen, any greater than future is chosen,” Hesse wrote as he contemplated solitude, the courage to be yourself, and how to find your destiny. “Solitude involves us if we’ve got inside us the magic stone that pulls future.”
Solitude selected Thoreau as a lot as he selected it, for in it he discovered a treatment for probably the most somber recesses of his future: his frequent spells of depression, for which, within the epochs earlier than remedy, he knew no higher drugs than unpeopled time in nature:
Probably the most candy and tender, probably the most harmless and inspiring society could also be present in any pure object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There will be no very black melancholy to him who lives within the midst of Nature and has his senses nonetheless.
From the the private he pivots to the common, from the creaturely to the cosmic:
This entire earth which we inhabit is however some extent in house. How far aside, assume you, dwell the 2 most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk can’t be appreciated by our devices? Why ought to I really feel lonely? shouldn’t be our planet within the Milky Approach? This… to me to not be crucial query. What kind of house is that which separates a person* from his fellows and makes him solitary? I’ve discovered that no exertion of the legs can carry two minds a lot nearer to at least one one other.
This can be probably the most haunting and most transcendent discovery for any of us who search and savor these lengthy salutary solitudes below department and cloud: the conclusion that the worth of consciousness is loneliness, for infinite house and infinite incomprehension exists between any two minds and their singular umwelts. Life could also be the art of bridging lonelinesses, however we’re born into the one nice solitude and die into it. The worth of the house between the bookends is what we’d name love. Or artwork.
Complement these fragments of the altogether soul-slaking Walden — which incorporates Thoreau’s abiding knowledge on the courage to define your own success, even in opposition to the tide of conference — with Might Sarton on solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery and the cure for despair, Kahlil Gibran on silence, solitude, and the courage to know yourself, and Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor on the art of solitude as contemplative and creative practice, then revisit Thoreau on nature as prayer, knowing vs. seeing, and what it means to be awake.
