There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”

Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and spiritual rewards, its primal sanities.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was in his late thirties when he began answering the eager letters of the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul. Shortly after Rilke’s death of leukemia, Kappus published the correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet came to stand as one of the finest books of the past century. In a wonderful new translation by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows, Rilke writes:

What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.

MAY SARTON

A lifetime after she composed her stunning ode to solitude as a young poet, after she contemplated solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery upon entering her sixties, May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book — those were the days — but she cherished her solitude above even the most welcome company.

In a passage from her boundlessly rewarding journal The House by the Sea (public library) — which gave us her meditations on the relationship between gardening and writing, how to cultivate your talent, and the art of living alone — Sarton considers the tilting balance of her life. Reflecting on her approach to visitors, she writes:

I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson [Sarton’s prior home] focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his account of the months he spent at Walden Pond, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although Thoreau’s solitude was not in actuality as total as he recounted it, it was deep and transformative. In a long meditation on solitude and the meaning of life, he writes in Walden (public library | public domain):

It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.

[…]

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go [out among others] than when we stay in our chambers.

For Thoreau, who suffered bouts of debilitating depression and black grief, solitude was not a way of caving in on himself, as one does in loneliness, but a way of unselfing, of stepping beyond his small human turmoils and into the wider universe that holds:

The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.

SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL

In the last years of the nineteenth century, shortly after he originated an entire new field we now call neuroscience and a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neuron as the basic unit of the nervous system, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) composed a short, passionate book titled Advice for a Young Investigator (public library), predating Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by three decades. In it, he outlined the six psychological flaws that keep the talented from reaching greatness and pointed to solitude as the supreme incubator of true originality. He writes:

Our major commitment … is to discover ourselves before discovering scientific truth, to mold ourselves before molding nature. To fashion a strong brain, an original mind that is ours alone — this is the preliminary work that is absolutely essential.

[…]

Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought! How satisfying and rewarding are the long winter evenings spent in the private laboratory, at the very time when educational centers are closed to their workers! Such evenings free us from poorly thought out improvisations, strengthen our patience, and refine our powers of observation.

WENDELL BERRY

In his splendid poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” poet and farmer Wendell Berry located the remedy for despair in learning to “rest in the grace of the world,” which is most readily found amid wild solitude. He deepens the sentiment in one of the essays from his altogether wonderful and wonderfully titled essay collection What Are People For? (public library). Reflecting on the antidote to the two great enemies of creativity, Berry writes:

We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.

In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.

ROSE MACAULAY

Often, it is only when something is taken away that we fully appreciate its value; in being famished for it, we remember how deeply it nourishes us. In a delightful reckoning with the pleasure of being left alone after entertaining visitors, found in her 1935 collection Personal Pleasures: Essays on Enjoying Life (public library), Rose Macaulay (August 1, 1881–October 30, 1958) writes:

An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.

[…]

The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom… It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again.

STEPHEN BATCHELOR

Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor echoes Berry’s sentiment in his thorough reckoning with solitude as contemplative practice, and writes:

By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.

[…]

Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others.

MICHAEL LEUNIG

A century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of “fertile solitude
from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher Michael Leunig offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence:

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS

Terry Tempest Williams has devoted her life to giving voice to the dialogue between human nature and the rest of nature, whether we call it wilderness or landscape or environment. In Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (public library) — which also gave us Williams on change and denial — she writes:

Solitude… is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.

HERMANN HESSE

In the wake of WWI, a quarter century before he won the Nobel Prize, Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877–August 9, 1962) composed an impassioned letter to the disaffected young. In it, an epoch before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliantly unsexed man as the universal pronoun, he writes:

Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny:

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves… It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity.

[…]

Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.

Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness — that archnemesis of solitude — then revisit poet Elizabeth Bishop on why everyone ought to experience at least one long period of solitude in life and artist Rockwell Kent on the relationship between wilderness, solitude, and creativity.

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My name is Maria Popova — a reader, a wonderer, and a lover of reality who makes sense of the world and herself through the essential inner dialogue that is the act of writing. The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first 15 years) is my one-woman labor of love, exploring what it means to live a decent, inspired, substantive life of purpose and gladness. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, eventually brought online and now included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive, it is a record of my own becoming as a person — intellectually, creatively, spiritually, poetically — drawn from my extended marginalia on the search for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tendrils of human thought and feeling. A private inquiry irradiated by the ultimate question, the great quickening of wonderment that binds us all: What is all this? (More…)

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