some thoughts on solitude

God knows I’m writing this from the depths of something. I’m not sure what. I wrote the first half of this essay in Paris, in a corner of the lobby of the hotel where Oscar Wilde died. The second half I wrote in Red Hook, where I used to live, and often wish I still lived, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, which today is grey and relatively untroubled, and the sky is almost white in places even though the sun is shining. I am writing this on an e-ink tablet called a Remarkable, on which I can do nothing but type and read. This is, in fact, a departure. Most of what I’ve written in the past three months I’ve written longhand, in Venetian notebooks I’ve not yet transcribed, in handwriting I can barely make out. I’ve deleted my social media accounts. I’ve been on hiatus from Substack. I deleted WhatsApp from all my devices except a T-9-using flip phone and a buggy e-ink tablet I don’t really use for anything else, which means in practice I only ever text people back about active logistics or, on rare occasions, as part of painfully overdue, email-length correspondence.

I’m taking drawing lessons, and piano lessons, and acting in an experimental theatre company, and trying to train myself to get used to my own company. I am not entirely sure which of these circumstances matter, and which are incidental. I’ve been trying to create, probably too obsessively, a beautiful life, by which I mean a life free of distraction of the wrong kind, and full of the right. Or better yet I’m trying to pay attention to the right things. It is unsustainable, probably, in the long-term. But it’s got me thinking.

I have been thinking about art, and beauty, and magic, and loneliness, so long that I cannot separate the strands from one another. My spiritual director likes to talk about schoolroom when toddlers are done with it: Play-Dough coalescing into brown. What does magic have to do with God? What does love have to do with loneliness? What does beauty have to do with desire? What does any of this have to do with art? Is reality something we make, or something we encounter, and if it is the former what is stopping reality from just being the exercise of the strongest person’s will, or at least the will of the most charming?

In any case I’ve been dreading writing this essay. That and termtime are why it’s taken me so long to update this substack. The idea of writing for public consumption at all, right now, feels like a strange encroachment on this life I’m trying to build, although it feels more like building an encampment than a castle. I joked to a friend recently that I’ve become a “digital anchorite”. I’ve gone to ground.

I don’t want to do this forever. I don’t miss looking at Substack metrics, which feels like another form of social media, but I do miss the kinds of conversations, maybe even the kinds of confessions, Substack engenders. There were a few weeks this summer where a few friends and I wrote frenzied pieces and edited each other in a groupchat and that energy invigorated me. I am just lonely enough to miss writing about God and art and beauty for other people, because I am precisely at the point where I want to work out with other people some version of whatever I’m wrestling with right now. But it’s taken me a while to get there.

Which is all to say, for about three months now, I’ve been thinking about solitude as something to be lived into. I’ve been practicing it more than I usually do, which is to say I stay home more than one night a month, now, which is not introversion by anyone else’s standards but to me feels like moving to a foreign country. I go to the theatre alone, and to movies, and museums, and to shape note singing. I take long walks and longer rides. I’ve become a Bad Texter. I say no to things, even houseguests.

I’ve been trying to work out if I like it or not. I think I don’t. It’s making me a little bit depressed, which is a state unfamiliar to me. I’m more used to more extravagant emotions. I’m experiencing a kind of aridity of desire, except that it feels generative rather than sterile, and I don’t know enough about global topography to tell you whether there is a place where things grow despite dryness. I can’t tell if this is just what waiting feels like.

Nevertheless, what’s started to obsess me is precisely the limits of one’s own interiority. Or rather, what obsesses me is the idea of my own interior castle as a place -- a memory palace; a wasteland; a site of monsters, or the image I like best, which is a ruined garden: weathered and overgrown and still in memory of what a perfect garden might be -- that I can go, and that other people can affect, and also the place where magic (whatever it is) works, insofar as images in the imagination seem quite obviously to yield material results eventually, and also the place that my novels come from, which seems obvious in the abstract but is for me a revelation. The experience of writing fiction feels, more than ever, like a translation of something that exists in that place into a medium designed, specifically, to smuggle it into someone else’s interior castle. Then again, everything that is inside my interior castle got there because I went out swing dancing, or got my heart broken, or had a night at a piano bar with friends.

I never planned to live alone again. I am happiest as part of a family; I like when tables are full and guest beds are overcrowded and there is somebody cooking in my kitchen and somebody else playing my piano. And so much of my writing, over the past few years, has been so critical of “liberal autonomy,” a term I’m no longer so sure of, and of the algorithmic internet as a site of fragmentation and atomization and division. I believe, wholeheartedly, in the communitarian ideal; I can’t wait to have somebody playing my piano again; I think that the best parts of being in love, or being part of the body of Christ, involve a perichoretic slippage that can reasonably be termed “loss of the self.” I love my groupchats. I want my best friends in my pocket at all times to tell me what to do, and what to think, and whether that article I read on Substack was worthwhile or just verbose.

And yet. And yet. There is something else. There is something that cannot, and I am starting to think should not, be subsumed in love, or even friendship (maybe only in God, and even then I’m not sure whether whatever the resurrection of the body is supposed to be means that this, too, gets preserved in the end). And I think it’s something that is connected to our own solitary selves, to the enormity and expanse of those interior castles, which the algorithmic Internet erodes. I’m starting to think maybe the problem is that we’re not atomized, or autonomous enough. That it’s precisely the porousness between our souls and the world, or else the kinds of images and phrases and memes that can now so easily permeate those boundaries, that render us so susceptible to a kind of force I can only describe as a felt sense of unreality. It’s like pornography. I know it when I feel it.

Whatever else I’m feeling, or not feeling, right now, it isn’t that. That which solitude engenders -- of both the “flip phone Internet detox” and physical kind -- is a grudging relationship with the real. The Internet is a place I go -- as I’ve written, on a desktop, which delimits it. So too is the world with other people in it. I go out; I retreat. I see something and I spend hours poring it over. I’m trying to figure out where, if anywhere, the illusions are. And my small experiment with solitude taught me, at least, that it is worth spending time in the ruined garden, sifting between the real parts of myself and the images. But, I think, not too much time. Sometimes it’s good to get out of the forest of forms.

But I think, maybe, it’s precisely my lack of access to liminal spaces -- to the world of scrolling, which is both solitude and non-solitude, which is the constant and even overwhelming onslaught of images -- that’s made me more conscious of both social life and also solitude, crystallized, and how necessary it is to do both things fully, instead of one thing a little bit in-between.

To write in the mornings and go dancing at night. Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m dancing.

Another word I’ve been too suspicious of, in the past: “authenticity.” I think it’s overused, and I think it’s treated too easily as interchangeable with our desires, and also it is patently clear to me, in the middle of this time of silence, that the experience of being oneself, authentically, or living out one’s vocation, feels so substantively different, and spiritually distinct, from not being that person that it seems to me spurious not to have a word to reflect that difference. The fact that it’s difficult to tell what comes from the pure unsullied part of our ruined gardens,, from God or from us or from Truth or from Reality, and what comes from sin or perverted desire or the worm in the apple or the blight in the crops (and what comes from the perpendicular interweaving of both, and what just comes from wanting what other people do), seems to me to be the whole point. Solitude means time with both. It means the still small voice, and also the kind of shadows that give us Symbolist art, which often terrifies me. (Last month I saw the symbolist art exhibit in Chicago, which chilled me).

There is a kind of presence I am only sometimes capable of, when I do not feel like I’m in my garden at all. Or else, when there is no clear distinction between my garden and the world’s. It usually comes when I am a little bit drunk with friends I love deeply, although sometimes it comes through art. (After writing the first half of this essay I got lucky at the Louvre and managed to see the Mona Lisa on a night when there were not so many other people in the room, and everything that has ever been said about it does not capture that it feels substantively different to almost every other painting I’ve ever seen, that it captures something). It comes through being in love with other people, in the romantic sense, and the sense of friendship, and the sense of being in love with the whole world. The closest to God I’ve ever felt is in those moments. The world I want to write about happens in those moments. Solitude for me, at its best, is less about the creation of images, or words, than their separation: the recollection in tranquility. It is where I understand what I already know, or where I make sense of what I already understand. Or where I have time to put it all into words.

It’s as much a journey – and at times an unpleasant one – as venturing out into the world. And it’s something that I am glad to protect, by virtue of my flipphone and my desktop computer and my strict and strange routines. But it’s not, I’ve come to conclude, an end in and of itself, or even a better route towards God. For me, at any rate. It is, at most, a time to tease out the strands of the greater reality I’m in the rest of the time. It’s an unpleasant practice, for the actual business of living. But my thoughts are only real insofar as they are about real things, and the best thing that solitude has done, for me, is to spend enough time with shadows to be able to start to tell the difference.

This was supposed to be an essay about being a hermit, and hermeticism of various kinds, and what that means for being an artist. I’ve been planning, and putting it off, for weeks.

But to be honest by the time I’ve finished writing, being a hermit is no longer what I want. The best nights I’ve had, over the past week, and month, are with the people I love most, where the world (and Paris, and New York) overwhelms and surprises me. I think the part of me that is an artist is the part of me that lives, subject to other people, receptive to other people, in love with other people, as much as the part of me that needs a silent hour, in the morning, to write down why. That time, for me, is a sacrifice: maybe, ultimately, a necessary one, to set down whatever needs setting down. But a sacrifice, all the same.

But I’m glad that my longing, ultimately, my vocation, whatever authentic part of me really wants to be swing dancing at midnight, and also writing at dawn, takes me back to the world.

Tonight I’m going dancing.