Reading & the Good Life
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This Friday, an exploration into the practice of solitude begins through Stephen Batchelor’s book The Art of Solitude. Below, you’ll find a brief meditation on the meaning of solitude, along with a few selected passages from the book!
What is Solitude?
Solitude is an art. It is much more than simply being alone. Solitude is not reserved for periods of mere isolation (The Art of Loneliness).
In the opening pages of The Art of Solitude, Batchelor writes,
Solitude, like love, is too complex and primal a dimension of human life ever to be captured in a single definition. I don’t intend to ‘explain’ solitude. I seek to disclose its extent and depth by telling the stories of its practitioners.
Interestingly, some are drawn to solitude, while others experience resistance. (e.g., Pascal famously observed, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”)
In his classic The Way of the Heart, theologian Henri Nouwen stressed: “It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness.”
The practice of solitude is a way of being that needs to be cultivated.
The philosopher Montaigne advised in an essay titled On Solitude,
Retreat into yourself, but first of all, make yourself ready to receive yourself there. If you do not know how to govern yourself, it would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.
Montaigne observed that solitude is not a particular location. If we don’t first lighten ourselves and our souls of the weight of our burdens, wrote Montaigne, moving about will only increase our troubles.
The practice of solitude can feel selfish. But it shouldn’t.
Moments of solitude (or quiet contemplation), whether before a work of art or simply observing one's breath, allow us to rethink our lives and reflect on what matters most.
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