On Solitude

The pandemic has now been with us for more than a year. Here in Ontario we are in the midst of a cruel third wave, and that has meant yet another lock-down. We know that this trial will end, perhaps by the summer, perhaps by the fall. We know that, by comparison with many places, we’re fortunate. But just the same, it has been a hard year, not only because of the suffering and the toll of death wrought by this continually mutating virus. Kids have been deprived of schooling; careers have been delayed; normal medical tests and procedures have been postponed, possibly with serious consequences; family relationships have been tested and strained; mental health has suffered. Isolation takes its toll—although our dogs have been very, very happy. 

I have lived alone for thirty years. I'm used to it. My days follow a fixed pattern, sometimes disrupted: get up around five; spend a lot of time reading newspapers; write and draw in the mornings; take a nap after lunch; spend a couple of hours every afternoon walking the Arboretum; try not to drink too much wine at dinner (mealtimes are boringly regular, as is the food: I like that); read or stream a movie or an opera in the evening. E-mails yes—but few calls. And then there’s the habit of prayer, which gives the day its backbone, morning, noon and night. 

So the pandemic hasn’t meant much change to my basic routine—a bit more rigor in the social isolation; cutting back my already limited social activities; social-distancing and mask-wearing and hand washing; Zoom inevitably, but not, happily, every day. Yet it feels different, as the weeks and months tick by. Something has changed, beyond the strange quiet in the streets. I’ve learned something about solitude. 

The seventeenth century thinker and mystic, Blaise Pascal, memorably tells us that “the whole misery” of humankind stems from the fact that we are incapable of being alone, in our own chamber—and as a result we plunge into distractions. What are distractions? He offers a list, which includes obvious things like social engagements and fashion, but also real or imagined insults and conflicts and even war. As if the normal stuff of life itself was all “distraction”.

The pandemic is like a Pascalian experiment, if I can make an adjective from the great man’s name. It has forced us all to spend a year in our own chamber, without all the noisy paraphernalia of time and need and passion, thus throwing us on our own resources. 

Hence my question: have we—have I—learned anything? Has this experience changed me? Am I just as subject to distraction, as before? 

There is a long religious tradition of solitude: Siddhartha in solitary meditation by the river, awaiting enlightenment; Moses on the mountain; Jesus in the desert; Mohammed in his cave—each of them alone with his god. Those are the obvious examples, founders all; and then there are generations of seers and seekers and prophets and saints—including artists—who in their own ways entered their own versions of the desert or the cave or the mountain top.

And so I wonder, what has this time of solitude given me? 

Three words rise to the surface of my mind: abundance; freedom; and power. 

I have to immediately declare that these three words shock me somewhat, not in themselves, not that; but rather at the notion that I—I?? This person sitting here at this desk, before this computer? Me?—that I would in any sense lay claim to any one of them. 

But there they are, three words hanging there in the intellectual ether, like spells in an ancient tale (or Lady Macbeth’s imaginary knife)—and I want to pick them up, one at a time, as if each were a strange object., something from some other world, and turn it over and over in the light, and really look at it; savor it: let each word speak.

Abundance. Solitude is essential for creation. It’s the necessary precondition—just as holy people need solitude to connect with their god. Art flows from solitude, the way words and music flow from silence. In my own tiny pandemic life, it’s been drawing and comics and starting in a new place. This website, such as it is, is the result. It would not exist but for the pandemic. Grateful seems too mean a word.

Freedom. Gabriel Garcia Marquez refers to the “humiliation of eating alone” in one of his stories. As if being alone is only for losers; as if loneliness (which is part of our condition, the flip side of our need for other people) were a thing of shame. As if being seen to be alone were worse than loneliness—and I think that’s what I’ve felt for much of my own life. How dumb is that! But what I’ve now understood is that solitude frees me first of all from the need to be always pleasing other people; and deeper, from the desire to control anyone but myself. I think that’s freedom to love—and allow myself to be loved. 

And that leads to the third word—a different kind of Power. This power is not my own. It’s a matter of resting in a reality that is somehow separate from time, the way you let yourself float in a pool of still water; the way you listen to silence and that’s a necessary contradiction, since it’s impossible to listen to what you can’t hear, to an absence, any more than you can “see” the dark. But that, paradoxically, is what it is, a kind of quiet sense that I am in some way part of a completeness beyond myself.

I think these three words amount to a way of being rather than doing. Distractions are all about doing, while being is Other. Every spiritual tradition must have a version of the Martha and Mary story from the Gospel: two sisters, and one (Martha) is bustling around, frantic with care as she prepares the house and the meal and serves the crowd, while the other (Mary) sits at the Lord’s feet, listening. It’s Mary who has chosen “the better part”, to quote Jesus. 

Although just the same, we have to eat.