solitude
The telephone conversation is, by its very nature, reactive, not reflective. Immediacy is its prime virtue. The immediacy delivers quick company, instant stimulation; the stimulation is cathartic; catharsis pushes back anxiety; into open space flows the kind of thought generated by electric return. The letter, written in absorbed solitude, is an act of faith: it assumes the presence of humanity: world and self are generated from within: loneliness is courted, not feared.
“Letters are Acts of Faith; Telephone Calls Are a Reflex,” The New York Times, July 31, 1994.
Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours.
“Everything I Know About Writing Poetry,” in A Hundred White Daffodils (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1999), 141.
Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects. It’s very difficult nowadays to be alone because we all own watches. Have you even seen a saint with a watch? Yet, I’ve looked everywhere for one even amidst the saints known as patrons of the watchmakers.
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. by Dore Ashton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 84.
Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 119.
Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it.
Gravity and Grace (London: Routledge, 2002), 67.
The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own. I looked up at the enormous stained-glass window and the beautiful oak staircase. I loved that building.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 127.
What a commentary on our civilization, when being alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one practices it—like a secret vice!
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 43–44.
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
“Solitude,” in Walden: or, Life in the Woods (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1899), 156.
Certain springs are tapped only when we are alone.
Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon, 2005), 50th anniversary ed., 44.
I cannot get enough alone to write a letter to a friend. I retreat & hide. I left the city, I hid myself in the pastures. When I bought a house, the first thing I did was to plant trees. I could not conceal myself enough. Set a hedge here, set pines there, trees & trees, set evergreens, above all, for they will keep my secret all year round.
July 1849 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 401–402.
Exploration of my (apparently vital) need of solitude: and yet I have a (no less vital) need of my friends.
I must therefore: 1) force myself to “call” them from time to time, find the energy to do so, combat my—telephonic (among other kinds)—apathy; 2) ask them to understand that above all they must let me call them. If they less often, less systematically, got in touch with me, that would mean for me that I must get in touch with them.
Entry dated August 3, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 181.
I have not a desire but a need for solitude.
Entry dated January 22, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 91.