Solitude has a bad reputation in today’s world. Many see it as a state to be avoided at all costs, equating it with loneliness or rejection or even solitary confinement. An article in Psychology Today called “The Joy of Solitude” reports that based on recent research, given the choice between a mild electric shock and solitude, many people opt for the electric shock.

Thanks to advances in technology, solitude, whether you want it or not, is becoming increasingly hard to find. We’re crowded and jostled on all fronts by the “electric shock” of countless other voices. Boundaries between us and the world have been erased, our individuality overwhelmed, our values interrogated, our voices drowned in the relentless roaring buzz of the social masses. Young people are especially vulnerable to this trend. For them it’s not an option, it’s the status quo. To be considered socially acceptable in this hyperlinked world they must be a part of it, frantically gathering “friends”, “likes” and “followers” in a quest for the holy grail of “going viral”. Gaia Bernstein, the Technology, Privacy and Policy Professor of Law at Seton Hall University, has just released a book called “Unwired: Gaining Control Over Addictive Technologies” which addresses just this problem, and should be required reading for all parents with young children at home.

But it’s not just young people of course. Many adults today can’t imagine life without their mobile phone and can do nothing (not even go to the toilet) without it. And yet there’s something disquieting about living in a constant state of connection. It’s really hard to think on a level beyond the superficial and the immediate. When time is at a premium thanks to the incessant demands of job, school, parenting, commuting, instagramming, facebook posting, Tik Toking, Twittering, emailing etc., keeping up is exhausting. Even if we want to, there is no time to stop, slow down, look at the changing light, listen to the sound of quiet, be aware with all our senses of our place in the world and become conscious of our inner life.

Matthew H. Bowker, a psychoanalytic political theorist, commented in an article in Atlantic Magazine, that “our unconscious requires solitude to process and unravel problems, so much so that our body imposes it upon us each night in the form of sleep. By removing us from the constraints, distractions, and influences imposed upon us by others, solitude frees us to reconnect with ourselves, assimilate ideas, and generate identity and meaning.”

“There are enormous emotional and psychological benefits of solitude. The most important benefit, which is really the foundation of all the others, is that solitude means ‘being with oneself.’ It is about developing a relationship with oneself, speaking to and listening to oneself. In this sense, solitude is not a luxury but a necessary precondition if we want to know ourselves, be ourselves, and become creative, responsible agents in our own lives. Without solitude, we can’t really know ourselves, and so, we can’t act in ways that express who we really are.”

Someone who came to appreciate how solitude can benefit creativity is the poet, novelist and memoirist May Sarton. Her book “Journal of a Solitude”, first published in 1973, charts a year in her life when she lived alone in a house in the small town of Nelson, New Hampshire.

The book begins: “I am here alone for the first time in weeks to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened …”

Over the course of that year she struggled with depression and was plagued by doubts about her work, as many writers are. One of the things she discovered about solitude was that it isn’t always an unalloyed pleasure, that often the confrontation with the self brings discomfort, the image reflected back, like the one in the mirror, can be clouded by a muddle of thoughts within which it’s hard to find the clarity creativity demands.

“Cracking open the inner world again, writing even a couple of pages, threw me back into depression …”

For Sarton, maintaining a calm centre in the face of her susceptibility to depression demanded considerable emotional and spiritual effort. That she acknowledged the conflicting parts of her personality dispassionately and developed a good understanding of the self-created roadblocks she had to negotiate, made the process intrinsically more rewarding.

“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.”

“Extracting the juice”, or finding the “essence” of an encounter, an experience, an idea, a relationship is a process that needs the breathing room of solitude to work. Mulling over is perhaps the mental equivalent of braising in culinary terms, a slow and gentle cooking that allows flavours and aromas to achieve their fullest potential, a gentle simmering that transforms the tough meat of an under-informed idea into the richness of enlightenment.

There are so many nuggets of hard-won wisdom in this journal, many of which seem to float up from the depths of a turbulent soul. Sarton was well known for her volatile temperament, described by her biographer Margo Peters as prone to subjecting her close friends to “terrible scenes, nights of weeping, rages, blowups”. This tendency is well recognised by her and she alludes to it in the book. It is in fact one of the emotional challenges she hoped to address by this self-imposed period of solitude.

“For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation. But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting, and tormented self. I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose — to find out what I think, to know where I stand.”

Sarton’s inner and outer “collisions” exhaust her because they obscure the point of what she’s trying to do and make it so much more difficult to achieve even the most straightforward creative goal.

Writing is a solitary task. That confrontation with the page I referred to in a previous post can only bear fruit if your mind is unencumbered by other stuff. This is why writers’ retreats are so beneficial. But it’s rarely that we get to go and spend time in a cabin in the woods or a shack by the ocean or be selected to join the rarefied gatherings at somewhere like Yaddo.

Most of the time we must find time and space to work while contending with the intrusions of the everyday world. And it’s finding that delicate balance between the need for mind space and the necessity of engaging with others that’s so challenging, especially for women. As the nurturers, caregivers and crux of the domestic realm (in most cases), women feel obliged to prioritise these roles. If we don’t, we feel guilty (especially if our work isn’t bringing in an income).

Virginia Woolf most famously stated the case in “A Room of One’s Own”, in which she says “it is necessary to have five hundred [pounds] a year and a room with a lock on the door if you are to write fiction or poetry.” These days five hundred pounds a year wouldn’t cut it, but the principle’s the same.

When writing is our work, every interruption is hazardous to the flow of thought, something that’s often hard for others to appreciate. This is because the large amounts of time spent thinking between keyboard tapping aren’t evident as work. Margaret Atwood is credited as saying “when you sit at the desk all morning looking at the page and you don’t write anything, that’s writing too.” I might make this into a poster and stick it on my study door.

Living alone to some extent obviates the conflict between work and other more mundane tasks, but Sarton had something to say about this, too.

“This morning I woke at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. It is raining again. I got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift—and what did it was watering the house plants. Suddenly joy came back because I was fulfilling a simple need, a living one. Dusting never has this effect (and that may be why I am such a poor housekeeper!), but feeding the cats when they are hungry, giving Punch clean water, makes me suddenly feel calm and happy.”

Fulfilling the simple needs of others, be they people, plants, birds, cats, dogs or turtles, has such value because it gives us purpose,  something that’s often  nebulous in writing (the nagging thought persists – will anyone read it?)

Sarton’s wisdom on this: “Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and some pure foolishness. God bless Punch, who makes me laugh aloud!” (Punch was her parrot.)

Her solitude was everywhere lightened by her capacity to discern beauty in small things – the ever-changing qualities of light, the way it falls across a wall or lights up an arrangement of flowers. And not just to discern, but to absorb. She was able to take in the wonders of the natural world and transform them into an element of herself that shaped her way of being in the world.

“The first delight I thought of was light. In this house the light has always been a presence—right now in a brilliant blue-green band on the sofa in the cozy room. A half hour ago it spotlit a pot of yellow chrysanthemums in there. I look out at trees leafless now except for one maple, where high up against the blue there is still branch after branch of translucent warm gold. The leaves sift down one by one like notes in music.”

“Later on when I was wandering around watering flowers, I was stopped at the threshold of my study by a ray on a Korean chrysanthemum, lighting it up like a spotlight, deep red petals and Chinese yellow center, glowing, while the lavender aster back of it was in shadow with a salmon-pink spray of peony leaves and the barberry Eleanor picked for me. Seeing it was like getting a transfusion of autumn light right to the vein.”

There are many uplifting passages like this in the book. To the extent I became inspired to set a vase of flowers on my own desk and am writing this looking at the deep crimson glow of three velvet petalled roses. 

It’s this, more than anything, that solitude gives us. Whether it’s a moment, a few hours, weeks or more, being alone heightens the sensory receptors in our brains. Otherwise unnoticed aspects of our surroundings suddenly assume an unexpected brilliance. And that in turn seems to open up a space within which we might discover the seed of an idea or be inspired to imagine without boundaries.

“The delights of the poet as I jotted them down turned out to be light, solitude, the natural world, love, time, creation itself. Suddenly after the months of depression I am fully alive in all these areas, and awake.”

For Sarton, the year-long communion with the self that prompted “Journal of a Solitude” held rich rewards. Of the 53 books she published, this one became a best-seller, won her countless fans and although it may have added to her feeling of being besieged by the outside world, I hope she took joy in it.