The Grace Of Solitude

There are many a times where I wanted to be alone. I still have these social or maybe unsocial, cravings. But I can see far into a future where this desire will always remain true.

I would put it like this: A potency would compel me to separate from company, family and friends and otherwise, to be distant from their conversations. I wanted to be elsewhere with my own imagination. My mind wanders away in our face time during mid-listening. Words from others would lose their magnetism out of no fault of their character. It is down to the momentum, dissipating like a football rolling on trimmed grass, with which I ran into this social obligation of “catching up”. The energy just goes into thinking how to recuperate in solitude. No energy is created or destroyed, you see, just transferred.

In my world of aloneness all occasions I sit by — or phrasing it in a more consciously detached manner — with myself. A book or magazine of a political or social nature would be in my hand. It possesses some therapeutic power, literature does, and reading works that inspired my favourite writers ushers in a historic conversation that defies both geography and time. It’s explorative and invigorating to have these voices from varying eras agree or clash with each other and it’s happening all inside my head. A privation like this is a privilege. Conversations like this I could participate in with no depletion of energy and, in the end, doesn’t leave me with Harry Angstrom’s feet (Rabbit, Run).

On other days it would just be in a café with a cup of black coffee (foundational yet simple taste) and maybe a slice of carrot cake, just observing the moving world. I listen to music that fittingly expressed my then contemplative mood — soundtracks, possibly, for ideas and thoughts.

These are my customised ideas of solitude. The self-criticism does barge in, of course, on occasion. In the traditions of a Dialectic how could it not?

It is hard not regarding this guilt of being wholly away from people a bit snobbish and hermetic. I sometimes deliberately cut short social meetings to not have to take out after a prolonged chin wag session the brown bag to hyperventilate.

But I would counter this by saying that I am by no means anti-social. I adore the friends that are still in orbit with an intensity that brims on the edge of platonic but not entering the gravitational pull of romance. It’s kept in balance, I would say, by the secure knowledge that our conversations never stall or stale.

Human interaction, especially on the level of Extroversion, exhausts me. It is only then, under a cloud of fatigue, do I want to escape with haste. Where to, you ask? Well, anywhere. As long as silence and muteness is my next date for the evening.

On the contrary, I seem to be energised by introverts which the majority of my friends are. The oneness, the thought experiments ping-ponging across the coffee table, is effortless. I now come to know that it is their deliberate, steadied and patient manner with which they discuss ideas that shake the knowledge tree, befalling some new fresh fruits to be engorged. I become more sensitive to what I think and react verbally. It leads me into unexplored grounds.

And after saying our ‘Goodbyes’ all I am left with is the itch to read into what we just discussed. The number of the people who have radiated this influence to me is still in the single digits.

Being alone, or the more stoic version, Solitude, is necessary as a force for my own social life. I say it like solitude is an obligation which is far from truth; it comes about under the current of my own decision — the will to live with agency under the jurisdiction of my own mind (Tt is, after all, the skull that I am housed in until the day I slip 6ft under. I should domesticate it…).

My time spent in solitude is fuel that keeps conversations interesting and avoids the mental wrong-turning towards Dull-Ville or Tedium Town. An Anglo-American hero of mine in writing and journalistic traditions, Christopher Hitchens, was given as a child a terse piece of advice by his mother, Yvonne, that would be the well-spring of his own intellectual output in the 20th and 21st Century: The greatest sin is to be boring.

The only way I could not be boring is to be alone for period. Texting is fine. But social meetups is a solid No. Not only because I need to regain mental fuel to keep chugging along tedious conversational tracks (some friends and acquaintances have confided in me that they never knew what to talk about with others); but, in order to take time to read by myself widely and deeply and to consider my position on troubling issues of the global psyche.

That conversational influence mentioned before — the scholastic charm that some rare people have that spur you to start on your own reading — is my ultimate goal. It’s a goal in avoiding the ‘boring’ tag to my name that cannot be reached by regurgitating stout facts as if my own.

To bat away this sinful charge of boringness would be to take what one has read and perform a revolutionary act: to modify the absorbed ideas to the next level. It would certainly be an inefficient pursuit of one’s mental energy to not bring light on the terrifying but noble entities that are an author’s Unanswered Questions. These difficult questions, both penetrative and enlarging, supersede the answers given already by an author; I try to look for what he or she didn’t say. It is these questions I look for in solitude.

Life pocketed with these questions is what makes it so dazzlingly kaleidoscopic and any interference with this — superficial talk and shapeless opinions that head toward plain plateau — is abhorred.

Time spent in solitude, however and wherever, is the only antidote to Boringness.

I will drink to Yvonne Hitchens tonight on Midnight’s hour in the New Year — in solitude of course.