Our Inner Life :
Solitude
13 March 2015
Where to begin. I was going to sketch the current state of my thinking about “the inner life.” And I shall, presently. On the way to the computer, however — at lunch, to be exact — I read the Folio essay in the new issue of Harper’s. (April 2015) It’s a piece by Fenton Johnson, “Going It Alone: The Dignity and Challenge of Solitude.” What with the thoughts already running through my mind, my reading of “Going It Alone” was something of a train wreck. I found myself in a sea of paradox and confusion. There: the train just sank to the bottom. Let’s swallow a paradox or two.
Isn’t spirituality something that ought never to be mentioned? Never preached or written about, or lovingly described in ecstatic poetry? It’s not that spirituality is private (although it is), but rather that the speaking, writing self dissolves in the experience. There is no ego capable of framing a report. Indeed, much writing about spirituality announces that very conclusion. Words cannot express or capture, so we’re told, the measure of spiritual life. All that can be discussed is a sort of hangover, an afterimage. Or perhaps some sort of koan.
Here’s another. Writing of the resolution to lead a celibate life, Fenton Johnson says, “I salute the courage of those who make such declarations in public, but I admire more deeply those who honor their vows in the solitude of their hearts.” Where does that leave the writer whose subject is the experience of celibacy?
What confuses me is the nature of Johnson’s intended reader. Who is he talking to? In our society, the solitary, celibate life is available to everybody who wants it, but Johnson’s solitaries don’t just pass the time in quiet rooms or spacious deserts. No: they write. Sometimes they paint (Cézanne); sometimes they preach (Jesus); but, mostly, they write. Now, it doesn’t take an essay such as this to inform us that writing, serious writing, well-packed with thought, requires extensive solitude. Everybody who has ever written a novel worth reading, for example, has spent a lot of time alone, or, in the cases of Jane Austen, Louis Auchincloss, and others, tuned out. My dear Kathleen has the gift of creating utter solitude wherever and whenever she needs to draft a document. Or when she wants to read a book. She will not hear music that happens to be playing in the same room. A video will not distract her. She is temporarily unaware of her body. I myself, in complete contrast, am helplessly responsive to the the slightest disturbances. Libraries have never been good places for me because, by their very nature, they make no provision for actual solitude. I require strict radio silence — voluntary solitary confinement. And I’m habituated to it. I need to be alone a great deal. The careful reader will quickly grasp that I can be alone when Kathleen is around because she isn’t around. Except when she wants to be, which is, I can happily say, not quite as often as I’d like.
I gather that none of the claims that I have made about my wife or myself would tempt Johnson into regarding us as living solitary lives. They are claims that could probably be made by most readers and nearly all writers. Celibate writers are rare. Great as my esteem for Henry James may be, I cannot allow the suggestion that his celibacy puts him in a higher heaven of writers. (On the contrary: James’s writing draws much of its power from sublimated sexuality. I think it safe to say that James was sexually troubled, and I would argue that the act of writing served as his sedative.) We’ll agree with Johnson that there have been some fantastic celibate writers. The question is how incidental this celibacy is to the writing.
I began by asking about spirituality because Johnson’s theme seems to be to praise the consecration of life to something other than love and companionship, but not just any something other — no. The consecration of life to meditation and then to writing all about it. Johnson praises James and his other writers for giving us the fruits of their solitude. What they wrote is “their gift to us, their spiritual children,” Johnson writes, and by “us,” he makes it clear that he means solitaries like himself. Is he trying to say that those of us who don’t live solitary lives can’t appreciate Henry James fully?
I am not going to try to straighten any of this out. I enjoyed reading “Going It Alone,” and could not more emphatically agree with Johnson about the importance of solitude in our mindlessly overconnected lives. But I could not grasp, and in fact probably refuse to grasp, what it might mean “to define, explore, and complete the self by turning inward rather than looking outward. “
***
Here is my thinking about the inner life: it is vital, but uninteresting. Essentially uninteresting. I must somehow conduct an inner life, simply to know what I’m working with here, but I don’t think that I can make it interesting to you. It is not very interesting to me, either, which is why habits are so important. I used to believe that habits were regrettable, because they were robotic. You’re not really living if you’re doing something habitual. But I have since learned that what goes on in the bathroom, for example, is of no real interest at all — unless it’s alarming, whereupon we act upon that alarm by calling the doctor; and even then, it is of interest only to us, our loved ones, and the doctor. What goes on in the bathroom is often vital, and, from the standpoint of society, it is vital that it go on in the bathroom. I am not going to argue that what goes in the bathroom could never be transformed into interesting reading matter, but I think we can agree that the subject is not going to become common anytime soon. My point is that the bathroom is a site of highly habitual behavior. It is not “really living,” but you’d be dead otherwise.
Thinking is also an act of the inner life, but it is no more interesting to others than what goes on in the bathroom. It is not thinking that is interesting. (Unless you’re Mozart.) It is what thinking inspires you to do. It’s what you say, or write, or commit to smoke signals, that is interesting. Or that might be interesting. Interesting things happen, always and everywhere and only, between people. Some of whom — note to literary solitaries here — are dead.
More to come. Meanwhile,
Bon weekend à tous!