Discovery through Solitude

“One must have something to create from, some life experience…Now I know very well that a life in solitude is not a life devoid of experiences.  But the human being is in the spiritual sense a long sighted creature.  We see most clearly at a distance; details confuse us; we must get away from what we desire to judge; summer is best described on a winter day” (100, Byatt). 

            Solitude is a word that has been known to evoke a negative connotation.  In the world today, solitude seems like an extinct entity when the Earth has a population of approximately 6.9 billion.  The constant presence of human civilization has created the indestructible need to be connected to others in some way, shape or form whether it is through socializing with one’ s peers or communication through technology.  Regardless of this continual shrinking of the world through advances in science and the expansion of the population, the notion of solitude is still essential in the strengthening of the human mind.  Without the silence that spiritual solitude generates, the creative mind is impossible to stimulate (Einstein).  It is crucial to step out of one’s body and clear the clouds that the prejudices of one’s own emotions can produce.  In Walden, Henry David Thoreau states that “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, 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.”  The solitude discovered by Thoreau was one that allowed him to live as Socrates frequently encouraged to have “an examined life.” 

Thus “a life in solitude is not a life devoid of experiences.”  This is illustrated in Phineas Nanson’s new love of nature and through the realization that the “senses of order and wonder, both, that I had once got from literature, I now found more easily and directly in the creatures” in which he studied.  The transformation in my eyes correlated with the romance of investigation that was discussed in class.  The research produced by a scholar in an isolated library and the research achieved by a scientist in a lab or in the wilderness parallel existences of gentle solitude.  The thoughts that are provoked in these settings are ones that have solved clues to the mysterious universe.  It is via the magnetizing power that solitude has on a human’s perception of the world that leads to freedom of exploration.