Alone (Not lonlieness)

Literature is full of examples of the beneficial influence of getting away from it all. Twenty-eight years on a desert island did Robinson Crusoe the world of good: he became more resourceful, overcame his initial despair to provide himself with all the necessary means for survival, found God and improved himself morally. Crusoe is fiction (though probably based on actual castaway Alexander Selkirk) but there is also no shortage of non-fiction accounts of happiness and wisdom earned through solitary living. Henry Thoreau’s Walden is perhaps the most famous, but think also of the lonely silences of the deep explored so blissfully by the diver Jacques Cousteau (described in his 1953 autobiography, The Silent World) or Wordsworth’s transcendental solitary ramblings in The Prelude. Some writers would have us believe that there is a certain type of experience – a heightened sense of being alive – which it is only possible to have when one is alone.
Despite this, spending a lot of time alone is generally considered a bad thing in the west. With its emphasis on relationships and community, our society is traditionally suspicious of the one who sets him or herself apart. It’s hardly surprising that most of us go to great lengths to keep ourselves busy when we have to be alone, and to surround ourselves with people whenever possible. Noise, distraction, belonging, the sense of being companioned – these are the things which make humans feel happy. Not silence, aloneness, and nothing in particular to do.
Is the transformative power of solitude available only to visionaries and castaways? Or should we all make an effort to seek out silence and solitude, at some point in our lives, in order to live life to the full? How can it be that being alone is a positive experience for some, and pure torment for others? A batch of recent books tackle these questions as they explore the positive and negative effects of being alone.
California-born Robert Kull has been seeking the “shift in consciousness” offered by spending time alone in the wilderness ever since he stopped taking LSD, aged 20. Some 35 years later and minus one leg (lost in a motorbike accident), the determined Kull decided to live alone for a year on a remote island off the coast of southern Chile, more than 100 miles by water from the nearest town. Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes is his part personal, part academic journal of that year (Kull was studying the effects of solitude on himself for a PhD).
Apart from the fact that he is there by choice, Kull is in many ways a modern-day Crusoe: good with his hands and, as luck, or in this case organisation, would have it, handsomely equipped. He has everything he needs to build a cabin and feed himself for a year including two laptops, solar panels and a wind turbine, a satellite phone, a canoe and two outboard motors. He also has company in the form of a cat, named Cat.
Kull’s island is not a tropical paradise though. In fact it’s extremely inhospitable, and he spends a lot of time battling the elements. Even in midsummer, when he arrives, he is blasted daily by freezing storms. For the first few months, he’s so busy keeping himself dry and alive that the effects of solitude go largely unnoticed. “Strange the way out here where there’s supposed to be peace and quiet I sleep with earplugs,” he muses one night, as the waves smash against the rocks and his wind generator howls like a banshee.
When he’s not battling with external demons, he’s got internal ones to deal with. Kull frets constantly about his “psychospiritual” condition, about slipping with his prosthetic leg, the pain in his shoulders, the pain in his tooth, whether he’ll ever make it to the glacier, whether he is wrong to hit Cat so much, and whether, by keeping a journal, he is breaking his solitude. After months of this, he writes: “My world feels constricted and shallow: cabin, tiny beach, wind, rain, moods, pain,” he writes.
In the end, nature comes to his rescue. He begins spending more time outside, sleeping in the crook of a tree (in his waterproofs), flying a homemade kite, watching the antics of the ducks, and conducting a scientific study of the movement of limpets on a rock. At last, the “shifts in consciousness” start to occur – a sense of oneness with his environment and moments of sudden, inexplicable joy.
One wonders whether Kull might have experienced these moments sooner if the weather had been warmer. On the other hand, perhaps the harshness of his environment was a necessary part of the process. Landscape – again of the bleak, austere variety – is certainly fundamental for Sara Maitland. “Virginia Woolf famously taught us that every woman writer needs a room of her own,” she writes. “She didn’t know the half of it, in my opinion. I need a moor of my own.” In her beautiful and intelligently written book, A Book of Silence, Maitland tells of her personal and intellectual explorations into silence over the last 20 years, which have taken her into increasingly remote parts of northern England and Scotland. Along the way she demonstrates – convincingly – that silence is not a lack of something, not a rejection of sociability and friends but a rich extra dimension, “a passionately strong positive source in the making of the modern self”.
It wasn’t always so. Maitland once lived the sociable life of a vicar’s wife, mother, and dinner party conversationalist – and very happily so. Then, rather suddenly, her marriage broke down, and she found herself in midlife living alone in a village in Northamptonshire. To her surprise, she loved it. She took up gardening and spent a lot of time praying, became less driven, more reflective and “a great deal less frenetic. And into that space flowed silence: I would go out into the garden at night or in the early morning and just look and listen...”
So began Maitland’s new life as a “silence-seeker”. Forty days alone on the Isle of Skye followed, where she monitored the changes in herself as she prayed, walked, meditated, embroidered and wrote. One morning she became suddenly overwhelmed by the “wonderful, delicious delightfulness” of her morning porridge. “It tasted more like porridge than I could have imagined porridge could taste,” she writes. Researching the experiences of other solitaries, she discovered that an intensification of the senses was something she shared with almost all of them – as well as a feeling of connection with the landscape, a sense of being mentally “in peril”, and sudden moments of great joy, or jouissance, as she calls them.
Despite believing in God, Maitland is careful not to mix the jouissance attained through prayer or meditation with the moments she stumbles upon when out walking in nature. In fact she decides that there are two types of silence – that of the religious devotee, which involves a shedding of the ego, and that of the creative artist, which involves a shoring up of the self. These are mutually exclusive, she says. As she aspires to both – being religious and a writer – it’s an irksome discovery, and one that she doesn’t fully resolve.
For Maitland, though, both types of silence clearly have a spiritual value. Ever the intellectual, she finds powerful stories of spiritual transformation in both religious and non-religious contexts. One of the most seductive she relates is that of the round-the-world yachtsman Bernard Moitessier who, during the 1968 Golden Globe, fell so “in love” with silence and the sea that he abandoned the race so he wouldn’t have to return to land.
Kull, too, is concerned with the spiritual dimension of his experience. He may have been studying for a PhD, but his journal is littered – to an irritating degree – with references to “Spirit”, as well as a mysterious “Presence”. On a scale between normal and paranormal, then, where do these spiritual experiences lie? And is “spiritual” indeed the right word for them?
The French philosopher André Comte-Sponville believes that it is. The Book of Atheist Spirituality is a bracing and engagingly written polemic arguing that spirituality should not be the exclusive monopoly of religion. He argues that non-believers have as much right to a healthy relationship with their spiritual side too – a sense, perhaps, of their interconnectedness with all that is mysterious and inexplicable in the universe. While some invoke God to explain away mystery, Comte-Sponville prefers to allow the mysterious to remain just that. “When you feel ‘at one with the All’, you need nothing more. Why would you need a God? The universe suffices.”
Like both Maitland and Kull, Comte-Sponville’s personal experiences of being “at one with the All” (a phrase he takes from the Indian guru Swami Prajnanpad) have occurred in nature. He describes walking at night with friends in a forest in France, when the conversation had died down. “Nothing remained but our friendship, our mutual trust and shared presence, the mildness of the night air and of everything around us ... My mind empty of thought, I was simply registering the world around me ... And then, all of a sudden ... What? Nothing: everything! No words, no meanings, no questions, only – a surprise. Only – this. A seemingly infinite happiness.” With appealing pragmaticism, Comte-Sponville says that such moments are available to anyone, given a clear night and no light pollution. “All you need is a bit of concentration and silence,” he writes.
For Thomas Dumm, however, such perks of silence and solitude are more elusive. A professor of political science at Amherst, Dumm lost his wife to cancer while beginning work on Loneliness as a Way of Life – a literary book which became increasingly personal. “I confess that I think more often of the worst of the experience of being alone than I do of the best,” he writes “...a certain kind of despair rather than the greater pleasures of solitude and self-reliance.” Usefully, Dumm provides a distinction between loneliness and solitude. “In solitude, we are each of us by our self, but not yet alone, because we are more or less happily occupied with our self, beside our self in a positive way”; whereas loneliness becomes a “monologue of desolation” in which we lose not only other people, but “a sense of ourselves”.
Dumm believes that loneliness is intrinsic to human life – indeed, something that has permeated contemporary existence like a disease. Dumm’s plea is for us to see our loneliness clearly, and for what it is, so that we may “if not escape its most powerful strictures, then at least begin to renegotiate the terms of our confinement”. Presumably this begins by accepting and not fearing the state of being alone. Without fear, might loneliness be transformed into its positive sibling, solitude?
Certainly one can take encouragement from the fearless Sara Maitland, striding about her silent moor, professing only ever to miss the company of another when attempting to put on a double duvet cover. It is reassuring too to note that, despite their extensive immersions in solitude, neither Kull nor Maitland ever feel like they are going mad – though both admit to hearing voices. If the overall testimony of these writers is anything to go by, it seems it might be worthwhile peeling off from the group now and again and spending a moment alone with the stars.

Susan Elderkin is author of ‘The Voices’ (HarperPerennial)