LITMIR.BIZ

      SOLITUDE

      I SAT IN MY SUNNY DOORWAY from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery,” Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) wrote of an experience at Walden Pond in the mid–1840s, “amidst the pine and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.” Though “naturally no hermit” and happily entertaining various visitors in his makeshift home in the woods, Thoreau pronounced a distinct and enduring blessing upon isolation through his two-year experiment twenty miles outside Boston and a mile or so from the village of Concord. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time,” he confessed. “To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” His commitment to simplicity and seclusion hardly made for loneliness or melancholy. He said that only once during his sojourn, and only “for an hour” as a result of “a slight insanity in my mood,” had he felt “the least oppressed by a sense of solitude.” His was not a misanthropic withdrawal from friendship and society, but a spiritual retreat into a natural world of revelatory sounds and seasons. The question about solitude that Thoreau put to himself and to his age was ultimately one of contemplative discernment: “What do we want most to dwell near to?”¹

      Beginning his sojourn in the woods on Independence Day in 1845, Thoreau gave practical embodiment to Transcendentalist self-reliance and religious aspiration, to “the solitude of soul” that his friend Emerson, fourteen years his senior, had already praised as a desideratum in his private journal and in his manifesto Nature (1836). “I got up early and bathed in the pond,” Thoreau wrote of his morning ablutions. “That was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did.” He reenacted in the glow of the sunrise his desire for casting off slumber and for awakening into “a poetic or divine life.” “To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?” His devout habits at Walden were anything but ethereal, enveloping his body, dress, food, and furnishings, which Thoreau imagined–loosely, to be sure–as a “Hindoo” discipline: “Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles…. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.” The angular hermit imagined an ascetic path of awakening; his exploration of the solitary life was a quest for a purity of soul and body.²

      Thoreau devoted a distinct chapter to “Solitude” in Walden and at another point imagined a dialogue between a Hermit and a Poet, which allowed him to bring his spiritual and artistic sensibilities into a direct, if ironic, exchange. The Poet, rustling through the woods, interrupts the Hermit in the midst of “serious meditation” and tries to draw him off in a diversion. The Hermit initially resists and tries to recover his frame of mind and its “budding ecstasy,” but finds that his thoughts have left no trail. “I was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life. I fear my thoughts will not come back to me,” the Hermit laments. Resigning himself to his lost opportunity for heightened spiritual awareness, the Hermit goes off with the Poet to fish. Confessedly, fishing in itself evoked mixed feelings for Thoreau; it was, by turns, an instinctual means of subsistence and sport, an offense to his “higher” inclinations to abstain from all “animal food,” and an emblem of meditative retreat. Fishing was potentially redeemable from the uncleanness of killing when viewed as a spiritual practice. It was for some, Thoreau surmised, “a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their bibles.”³

      Henry David Thoreau led the way in the American reevaluation of the spiritual potential of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)

      Thoreau's hermitage at Walden Pond constitutes no doubt the most famous American exploration of solitude. “If any American,” a contemporary commented a few years after Thoreau's death, “deserves to stand as a representative of the experience of recluseness, Thoreau is the man.” Courting notoriety, the Concord hermit created religious controversy in seeking his inspiration primarily beyond the pale of the churches and its saints. He set up the Buddha especially as a sign of his desire to move beyond the usual ligatures of New England Protestantism and to question standing religious authorities: “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing, and I like him too.” If Thoreau staked the originality of his religious journey upon the apparent confluence of the Concord and the Ganges, he still wrote in the shadow of the Bible and the church. His own solitude, however distinctive and celebrated, represented a wider cultural convergence and realignment, a crossing from Christian exemplars of holiness to more diffuse sources and inspirations. It took a lot of cultural work to get to Thoreau's Walden, let alone to produce William James's eccentric seeker for whom “at any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.”⁴

      Walden, with its powerful evocation of Thoreau's pond-side hermitage, emerged as the classic text in the Transcendentalist reconfiguration of solitude. (Concord Free Public Library.)

      Thoreau's experiment occupies a critical juncture in the long and rich history of the solitude of hermits, one of the romantic crossroads in the making of American spirituality. Transcendentalists were those strange philosophers, the historian Henry Adams wryly remarked in their wake, who “sought conspicuous solitudes” and who “looked out of windows and said, ‘I am raining.’” Adams may have found Transcendentalism's attention-grabbing hermits “unutterably funny,” but the movement's rise was crucial to the reconfiguring of the anchorite's practice. Thoreau and company revalued solitude, opening it outward from specifically Christian forms of retired devotion into more diffuse forms of aspiration, religious and artistic. “Spirituality did ever choose loneliness,” the second-generation Transcendentalist William Rounseville Alger (1822–1905) declared in his formative work The Solitudes of Nature and of Man in 1866. “For there the far, the departed, the loved, the unseen, the divine, throng freely in, and there is no let or hindrance to the desires of our souls.” Solitude, in effect, underwent a post-Protestant transformation in which the search for isolation and retreat became the spiritual motto for more than one generation of seekers. Thoreau and his circle managed to leave a lasting mark on American imaginings of spirituality, evident in a long train of figures from John Muir and John Burroughs to Thomas Merton and Annie Dillard who made the solitary life an object of meditation and desire. As Barbara Erakko Taylor cheerily explains of her “hunger for unbroken solitude” in Silent Dwellers (1999), “We all have idealized, even romantic, ideas of a hermit. Mine had a self-denying, Thoreau-like quality: a rustic cabin with wood furniture.”⁵

      The Encyclopædia Britannica of 1797 defined the hermit or eremite as “a devout person retired into solitude, to be more at leisure for prayer and contemplation.” It took the early Christian history as its baseline, reckoning the story from fourth-century accounts of St. Paul the Hermit and St. Anthony; indeed, it had no other frame of reference beyond these desert fathers and their austere devotions. That starting point

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