In Defense of Solitude (Part Two)

— “We are each … miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood.” -William Deresiewicz —

In last week’s post, I wrote:

The vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

And I noted that our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media indoctrinates us with two misguided notions: 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

In a 1968 interview in The Paris Review, John Updike alluded to the locales that tended to engender his best writing.

A few places are specially conducive to inspiration — automobiles, church — private places.

It was an offhand remark, not especially unique for its time. But in today’s cultural context does it not sound practically … eccentric? Private places? Anybody remember those? The phrase today tends to conjure one’s bathroom or boudoir, for it may be presumed that in those two places most of us still prefer technological chastity.

But I digress. My point is that today the intangible realm which increasingly claims our waking hours, the Internet, serves to drain our lives of private psychic space, and consequently of solitude, for the Internet is not and never can be a private sphere. (Concerning the irony of blogging about this stuff, see part one of this post.)

Firstly, of course, it is the Web’s connectivity that precludes privacy, but there is another reason we cannot be alone online. It is, quite simply, because we cannot “be there” at all.

Last week, Tim pointed out that the Internet is not an industry.  Following that line of thought, we discover that the Internet, in a critical sense, does not “exist.” (Stay with me now. I realize this amounts to a modern heresy. ) What I mean is that the Internet is not properly a realm, a sphere, a space or a room. It cannot be “entered.” It is a word, an abstraction, a concept, a fancy — albeit a marvelously impressive and even useful one.

Neil Postman, in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, traces the important distinction between ideas and things, and shows convincingly how in our information-saturated present day we tend to mistake technological notions and processes for actual, material absolutes. This profoundly alters our understanding of the nature of reality, and brings us to do immense damage to ourselves, each other, and our culture.

The isolated components which create what we call “The Internet” may be physical and tangible, such as a keyboard or screen, but a computer terminal is not the Internet, nor is a fiber optic cable or a modem. The Internet itself is immaterial. It cannot be touched, let alone inhabited. It is an idea — and by its nature it is unitary; i.e., collective.

Thus, you cannot “sit inside” the Internet as Updike sat in his car or upon his church pew, and you most certainly cannot “sit inside it alone.”

Remember “Virtual Reality”? Why is it that we hear this term less and less these days? Might its scarcity signal our total conversion to the ideology of the Internet — the belief that the erstwhile Virtual now constitutes Reality itself? If so, this would signal that we live in a veritable Technopoly, as Neil Postman argued seventeen years ago:

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

One thing I feel for certain: the Internet has produced in our culture a connection-addiction, a constant being-elsewhere, a daily transplanting of the self from its real, palpable world into a virtual reality, a hive life, a maze of information stimuli — and all of this threatens to deplete our efforts to sow personal, psychic, and spiritual independence. A primary benefit of being solitary, after all, is that it facilitates being, that natural state of the soul in which you find yourself “in the moment,” as they say. Right here, right now.

“In Technopoly,” writes Postman, “we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to ‘access’ information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented.”

He continues:

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed; i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

So, predisposed as we are to move our thoughts, our inner lives, our reading habits further online — and thus further into the public sphere, where collective technology dissolves and annuls our personal solitude — we ought to pause and ask:

• Whither goes our sense of self, our ability to be alone, think alone, believe alone?
• Whither goes our propensity for discipline and self-reliance, for doing a thing solely because we believe, down to our human core, in the thing’s intrinsic value — even if it should never be seen by anybody else and thus never elicit praise, profit, or prestige?

On the rear flap of an old edition of J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny & Zooey I recently discovered the following impish testament, penned by the novelist himself, and well worth framing above one’s desk:

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

Today we may ask: What if Salinger’s proverbial writer faces a compromised anonymity, a lack of solitude precluding the blessings (yes, blessings) of obscurity?

Say the young writer is — if not famous in a societal way — then “socially famous” on Facebook or MySpace; say he’s got 662 “friends” whose irresistible avatars dispel his focus hourly; say he’s engaged by thirty-seven e-mails daily; or say, instead of recording his thoughts and imaginings in the privacy of a paper-bound journal, he blogs these things to the world and then spends his days patrolling reader comments?

Connection, interaction has become the raison de vivre of our time. We rate our technologies first by the efficiency with which they allow us to reach another person and gather data. And quick, even instant measurability of that efficiency is a chief advantage of online media. Send an e-mail, get a response. Build a Web Site, then tabulate “unique visitors” and hits per day. Set up a Facebook page, count your friends. Within this hyper-social, data-driven ethos, does it not follow that endeavors failing to serve the ultimate utilities — i.e., connection and measurability — call for abandonment?

How, in such a culture, can one still conceive of spending three to five years writing a novel in the quiet of one’s study?

“The gods are just,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear, “and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.” (Aldous Huxley was so fond of the line, he included it in Brave New World.)

Here’s our friend Montaigne talking about solitude again:

Remember the man who, when he was asked why he took so much pains in an art which could come to the knowledge of scarcely anyone, replied: ‘Few are enough for me, one is enough for me, none at all is enough for me.’ He spoke truly: you and one companion are an adequate theater for each other, or you for yourself.*

The Internet, TV, and mass media in general promise to save us from ourselves. Solitude is now completely avoidable. But what do we lose when we lose solitude? What is the cost of trading in our anonymity?

“We are not merely social beings,” says William Deresiewicz in a dynamite article entitled “The End of Solitude,”

We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it. …No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

The spirit of the age notwithstanding, we possess in our solitude, our anonymity, our inwardness and interiority, the precious resources that have produced and sustained the best and most enduring cultural creations of the ages.

No matter how popularly devalued these resources become, no matter what suspicion or scorn each may arouse, we ought to hold them dear. The health and wellbeing of citizens, society, and culture depend upon it.

So I write this offline, after slow and fruitful days in real time, in silence, alone with my thoughts or in the company of printed books authored by wide-eyed souls, each of whom, in turn, studied and wrote alone.

And I post this as a reminder to myself above all, before logging off to seek more of where this came from.

…If we have thus deconsecrated ourselves — and who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to re-consecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane [temple] of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. — Henry David Thoreau

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of Solitude (Part One)”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”