Book Notes for Solitude

Book: Solitude

Author: Michael Harris

Highlights and notes

• I woke each morning thinking "What did I miss?" and went to bed thinking, "What did I say?" The crowd, that smorgasbord of perpetual connection, left me hungry. In fact, I realized, I’d been hungry for years. I kept asking myself: why am I so afraid of my own quiet company? This book is the closest I’ve come to an answer.

• To be clear: none of what follows is a pining for Thoreau’s old cabin in the woods. I don’t want to run away from the world—I want to rediscover myself within it. I want to know what happens if we again take doses of solitude from inside our crowded days, along our crowded streets.

• Living in large groups puts a major tax on any animal's neocortex. The larger a primate group becomes, the more time it devotes to "social grooming" ie. managing and monitoring affections, frustrations, aggressions. Depending on the group size, the amount of time primates spend grooming each other can reach 20% of a given day.

  • Technology magnifies our ability to groom each other, enabling us to debelop enormous cities, and eventually, "the global village".

• Nearly half of Americans now sleep with their phones on their bedside table, using them as surrogate teddy bears. In the same way that people are forced to engineer healthy diets for themselves in a world overflowing with the salts and sugars and fats we're designed to hoard, it's possible we're such compulsive social groomers that we now must keep ourselves from gobbling the fast-food equivalent. Has social media made us socially obese - gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?

• Role of solitude in the life of a child

  • A baby turns and stares into space and its mother thrusts a spinning toy or mirror before its eyes, thwarting the infant's ability to self-regulate levels of stimulus or sociability. Many feel that only contact with other people can produce thoughts and feelings in the infant, but psycologist Ester Buccholz's work pointed out that newborns actually arrive more inner-directed than outer. A 14 week old fetus will satisfy its own urges by sucking its thumb, long before it ever has access to a breast. We are born, ready to do things on our own as well as to connect to others. Both needs - to be alone and to engage - are essential.

• "We meet at meals three times a day and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are" - Thoreau. We reach a threshold after which more "contact" creates only an odd kind of loneliness, a crowd-sickness. We groom and get groomed but receive diminishing returns and remain unsatisfied.

• The common cure for loneliness is more connections, yet exercising our solitude is another option. Time alone is inevitable - but can we thrive when it occurs?

Good question: What is solitude for?

• Retreat from crowds for formulation of brave new ideas ie. "eureka moment".

• Solitude is built into the stories we tell ourselves about illumination.

• Ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.

• Self therapy

  • Contemporary health practitioners largely ignore the benefits of solitude for the distressed: we rush towards group therapy when many of us are desperately in need of isolation.
  • Removing oneself from everyday society, "promotes self-understanding and contact with those inner depths of being which elude one in the hurly-burly of day-to-day life" - Anthony Storr.
  • Solitude enhances one's mental freedom, unshackling us by minimizing the intrusive self-consciousness that the presence of others inevitably produces.

• Bonding with others - seems like a paradox at first

  • Say goodbye to your mother and you may spend the next five minutes feeling grateful for her attention. Each time we write a letter, or reminisce about friends on a solitary walk, we reaffirm those bonds. We prove our faith in others - prove it and strengthen it - when we calmly experience separation. Only someone who feels at risk of being abandoned would be uneasy with periodic detachment.
  • Eric Klineberg, in Going Solo, argues that the ability to be happily alone is actually a sign of strong social ties, not a lack thereof. The countries with the highest rates of solo living - Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark - are all countries famed for their communal support.

These three together are key ingredients for building a rich interior life. Merely escaping the crowds was never the point: rather solitude is a resource - an ecological niche - inside of which benefits can be reaped.

• Threat to solitude from way back when
  • 1980s - "the telephone is an ever-present threat to privacy" and "the menace of 'Muzak' has invaded shops, hotels, aircraft, and even elevators." - psychiatrist Anthony Storr. The distant train whistles are an intolerable invasion of Thoreau's peace. Each generation has its expectation of solitude - and each expectation is assaulted in its turn.
  • "I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude." - Thoreau from Walden, published in 1854.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe