We are approaching midwinter. Some of us will be keeping the season of Advent, others anticipating Solstice or perhaps simply savouring the winter quiet and looking to find the still point of the year. It’s a time to hibernate, a time for rest and restoration, a time for going inward so that new seeds can germinate. Winter may be cold (Finistère is currently the coldest we’ve known it in our three years here) but it can also be a fertile period of replenishment of our resources and allowing creative ideas and new energy to germinate. We retreat to the cave—or the fireside—because going inwards is a way to re-centre, rebalance and eventually move outward again. The cyclical rhythm of the year is repeated in cycles of life, in the monthly phases of the moon, in our creative lives and writing… As Albert Camus puts it
In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
A time to pause
And we find that inner summer when we pause, often in moments of solitude, and nurture our inner life and reserves. It’s a constant question, of course: How do we nurture ourselves, live well and make space for rest and restoration amidst whatever life might be throwing at us?
We never exhaust that question, but the resources of writers before us, the natural world and our ancestors have bequesthed us so many stories of hope, rituals of rest, celebrations of the seasons turning, healing arts and so much more. They have done so even when their lives were hard, even in unbearable conditions. And in addition to the riches of resources all around us, we know that any healing journey must include rest and restoration, even if we find that hard to put into practice.
Unlike some creatures, humans don’t hibernate, though evidence from fossil records such as the pit of bones at Atapuerca near Burgos in northern Spain, strongly suggest that early humans around 400,000 years ago did just that—perhaps the only way to survive the frigid conditions of the time. But though we don’t hibernate in the way that bats or bears do, the pull of going inwards often settles on us in winter.
And in the face of a world that sees humans as ‘resources’ as well as commodifying all living creatures and plants, resting and dreaming, writing and rejuvinating, become radical acts of resistance.
A time for solitude
And whilst such radical acts of resistance give us resources to bring back to our families, our communities, any land we steward…, they also require some time alone. The artist Agnes Martin, who lived and worked in solitude for long periods was sure that.
The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone
It has a touch of hyperbole, but we all need some inner space that is accessed in quiet and which is well-defended. The poet, Wendell Berry, notes that it’s in solitude and quiet that,
one’s inner voices become audible [and] in consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives
And similarly, writing in her later life in Journal of a Solitude, during a period of aloneness while battling depression, May Sarton wrote
That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…
This time to process—how we live, how we relate, how we nurture ourselves while being there for those we love, for our communities, for the world we are part of—is not a luxury, but essential. I recently had an email from a writer friend who has been incredibly productive in the last few years and also runs a blog and a teaches online and zooms around the planet for in-person teaching. She only takes two weeks a year of real holiday (over the Solstice) and in that two weeks answers no emails. And she mentioned how much anger that generates. Some people (of course the vociferous minority but still disturbing) tell her how rude and unacceptable it is for her to switch off from the outside for a couple of weeks.
A time for fertility
What amazes me is that she can give so much from so little time for solitude. The fruits may take a while to grow, but they begin in the ground, in the darkness, in the winter, in our interior landscapes.
Across the ages writers and artists have chorused the need for fertile solitude. The artist Louise Bourgeois championed solitude in her letters and diary (Louise Bourgeois: Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews 1923-1997). This is Bourgeois writing to her friend, the artist Colette Richarme, who quit Paris to work alone in rural France.
After the tremendous effort you put in here, solitude, even prolonged solitude, can only be of very great benefit. Your work may well be more arduous than it was in the studio, but it will also be more personal
But a time for loneliness?
Of course there is a shadow side to solitude, as with all things. and solitude can also be a difficult balancing act. When we are over-stimulated, over-busy and needing time to think and create, solitude is enriching, But when it is interminable and involuntary it feels very different. This is an area that Olivia Laing looks at in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, written while Laing was feeling completely alone following the breakdown of a relationship and in an unfamiliar, if populace, city—New York.
There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?
To answer these questions she dived into explorations of the lives of other writers and artists who had faced unbearable levels of loneliness. In writing about how they had imaged closeness and distance in their films and art, she began to be more present to herself.
Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them…
It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with other
[…] What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body.
But for all its difficulty and pain, Laing refuses to see even loneliness as a worthless experience.
I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind. […] Loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.
Instead of despairing, she finds a home in her outside perspective through the act of simply walking,
In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.
So often, un-selfing, the art of getting out of our own way is at the core of finding resources in the harshest experiences. And Laing’s other recourse to solace was not in seeking out company, but seeking out artists and writers who spoke to her feelings—the paintings of Edward Hopper being one deep source of comfort and sense for her. At the end of her time in New York, she writes:
When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
There are political dimensions to loneliness that need to be challenged in terms of how we live and relate as a society. When solitude slides into loneliness (even when we are not physically alone), then we are looking at different questions and challenges, but these do not undermine the value of creative solitude and shouldn’t make us shy away from taking time to nurture our inner lives.
A time for silence
A love of solitude and deeply quiet time (just some of the time) can so easily be construed as anti-social, selfish or just plain odd. As Sarah Maitland writes in A Book of Silence:
I got fascinated by silence; by what happens to the human spirit, to identity and personality when the talking stops, when you press the off button, when you venture out into that enormous emptiness. I was interested in silence as a lost cultural phenomenon, as a thing of beauty and as a space that had been explored and used over and over again by different individuals, for different reasons and with wildly differing results. I began to use my own life as a sort of laboratory to test some ideas and to find out what it felt like. Almost to my surprise, I found I loved silence. It suited me. I got greedy for more. In my hunt for more silence, I found this valley and built a house here, on the ruins of an old shepherd’s cottage.
Those who face chronic loneliness are more prone to health risks and while Laing is right to find solace when it hits, it’s not something to wish on anyone. But sought-out solitude is very different. We need it and those we love and serve need us to have its creative rejuvenation in our lives.
I’ll leave you with another piece of writing from May Sarton, her poem ‘Canticle 6’ from the collection, Inner Landscape, which is firmly in the camp of creative solitude:
CANTICLE 6
Alone one is never lonely: the spirit adventures, waking
In a quiet garden, in a cool house, abiding single there;
The spirit adventures in sleep, the sweet thirst-slaking
When only the moon’s reflection touches the wild hair.
There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone:
It finds a lovely certainty in the evening and the morning.
It is only where two have come together bone against bone
That those alonenesses take place, when, without warning
The sky opens over their heads to an infinite hole in space;
It is only turning at night to a lover that one learns
He is set apart like a star forever and that sleeping face
(For whom the heart has cried, for whom the frail hand burns)
Is swung out in the night alone, so luminous and still,
The waking spirit attends, the loving spirit gazes
Without communion, without touch, and comes to know at last
Out of a silence only and never when the body blazes
That love is present, that always burns alone, however steadfast.
Here’s to finding the pauses in our stories.