Category: solitude

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“Notes from Above the Clouds”

Psyche and Vimeo present an Aeon 15-minute documentary video titled “Notes from Above the Clouds,” about a man who quits emplyment as a routine office worker to herd sheep in the French Pyrenees. From the film’s description, Adham Dobai “thrives in the rugged solitude, finding a deep connection with the terrain, the animals and this ancient tradition” called transhumance.

URLs: Psyche: https://psyche.co/videos/a-former-office-worker-charts-his-own-path-herding-sheep-high-into-the-pyrenees; Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/1095097761

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Jewish Contemplatives

The Jewish Contemplatives blog has long been a unique web presence offering insight on the role of solitude in contemplative Jewish practice. For many years, editor Norman R. Davies of the UK lived in Granada, Spain, before moving several years ago to Safed, Israel. Davies was once a Carmelite monk and converted to Judaism, to an Orthodoxy that embraces contemplation and solitude, recovering an obscure but distinctive tradition within Judaism.

The blog includes Davies’ autobiographical essays: “A Hermit’s Tale.” A recent blog entry is titled “Solitude in Jewish Contemplative Practice.”

URL: https://jewishcontemplatives.blogspot.com/

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Solitude, childhood, writers

Research Gate offers a free open access acholarly article titled “Loneliness and solitude in gifted writers: the legacies of childhood” published in Journal of Psychosocial Studies. The article is also available as a PDF download. Abstract:

“In this study, we attempt to provide insight into the complex interplay between loneliness/solitude and the writing gift from the early years of life. Theories and research on giftedness, loneliness/solitude, and on the links between them suggest that creative literary production and loneliness/solitude are associated. To further illustrate these associations, we briefly discuss loneliness and solitude in the childhood, adult life and work of four gifted writers: Hans Christian Andersen, EdgarAllan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Beatrix Helen Potter. The theoretical framework of this study is twofold: various psychoanalytic formulations and Bruner’s social constructivist and intersubjective conceptualisation of the narrative gift. The main conclusion of this study is that gifted writers have, paradoxically, an intense experience of both painful and beneficial aloneness, which is the inevitable outcome of the writing gift but also becomes the inspiration and motive force for ars poetica.”

URL: https://www.researchgate.netpublication/378636182_Loneliness_and_solitude_in_gifted_writers_The_legacies_of_childhood

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Loneliness reconsidered

In an essay in The Conversation titled “Being alone has its benefits,” psychologist Virginia Thomas offers the consideration that loneliness can evolve into “positive solitude,” addressing the “stigma of solitude” and the need to reframe solitude at the cultural as well as individual level.

URL: https://theconversation.com/being-alone-has-its-benefits-a-psychologist-flips-the-script-on-the-loneliness-epidemic-250742

For more articles on solitude by VirginiaThomas in Psychology Today, visit her web site:
URL: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/solitude-in-social-world

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Before you can be with others …

Originally published in Aeon, a short essay by Jennifer Stitt on solitude, with a forcus on the thought of Hannah Arendt.
From the essay:

“Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being “swept away,” as she put it, “by what everybody else does and believes in” — no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish “right from wrong, beautiful from ugly.” Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness — and conscience — but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.”

URL: https://aeon.co/ideas/before-you-can-be-with-others-first-learn-to-be-alone