photo by Collyn Ware

There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone. –May Sarton, The House by the Sea

In her last years, author May Sarton lived alone on the coast of Maine. In her journal, The House by the Sea, she explores solitude, the intimacy of being alone in your own body and spirit. In her reflections, she writes, [s]olitude, like a long love, deepens with time. She recounts a letter she received from a young woman who was living alone, a filmmaker who desired to make a film about those who live solitary lives. Sarton writes:

I told her that I feel it is not for the young (she is only thirty-three). I did not begin to live alone till I was forty-five, and had “lived” in the sense of passionate friendships and love affairs very richly for twenty-five years. I had a huge amount of life to think about and to digest, and, above all, I was a person by then and knew what I wanted of my life. The people we love are built into us. Every day I am suddenly aware of something someone taught me long ago–or just yesterday–of some certainty and self-awareness that grew out of conflict with someone I loved enough to try to encompass, however painful that effort may have been.

Sarton understood that solitude grows and ripens like a long love affair, that it matures over time into spiritual intimacy. Her claim that solitude is not for the young rings particulalry true for me. In the weeks I spent cleaning motel rooms during the summer of my freshman year of college, I was utterly alone. For days, I marveled in my newfound solitude, content to be alone with my own thoughts and a bottle of disinfectant. Soon, however, I longed for any interruption, any distraction that might take me out of myself and into something, anything else. I’d come quickly to the end of myself as I became painfully aware that, in solitude, I worried and fretted. I came face to face with my own limitations and, more often than not, moved through my work hours with shame as my constant companion. In truth, I was not a person by then, as Sarton wrote. I’d only begun to know what I wanted of life and was ill-prepared to digest the life I’d already lived. My solitude became a sad prison.

I understand, too, that although some may choose solitude, others may feel as though solitude has been inflicted upon them. Circumstances like illness, physical and/or emotional separation, retirement, and old age–just to name a few–may feel more like punishments than blessings. In these circumstances, solitude may be a crucible against which we test our mettle. We may literally count the hours until we’re rescued by human company. We may look for any distraction to fill the painful space that solitude brings. In solitude, we may see our cups as half-empty and rue the vacuum that it creates.

We may also lament we’ve become invisible in solitude. In our aloneness, we may feel ourselves slipping away. We may find ourselves believing that we’re simply out of sight, out of mind. Alone with our own spirits, we may find this intimacy anything but virtuous; we may find it soul-crushing. In solitude, we may languish and long to be seen. In the Atlantic article, “The Invisibility of Older Women” (Feb. 27, 2019), Akiko Busch considers the paradoxical virtues of invisibility:

A reduced sense of visibility does not necessarily constrain experience. Associated with greater empathy and compassion, invisibility directs us toward a more humanitarian view of the larger world. This diminished status can, in fact, sustain and inform–rather than limit–our lives. Going unrecognized can, paradoxically, help us recognize our place in the larger scheme of things.

At its best, solitude offers us opportunities to explore a more humanitarian view of the larger world, to recognize our place in the larger scheme of things. In solitude, we can turn our attention outward, instead of solely inward. That is, we can benefit from embracing the larger world and the larger scheme of things. In humility and gratitude, we can discover that we have lived, that we are living still, and that we continue to be blessed and challenged by a broken and beautiful world. Alone in our spirits and separated from our duties and distractions, we can draw closer to God. This is solitude at its best, at its most generous.

In Letters to a Young Poet, Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away… and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast…. be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust…. and don’t expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

I’m encouraged by Rilke’s charge to love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you, to embrace the growth that comes with it, to accept the love that is being stored up like an inheritance, and the faith that in this love there is a strength and blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it. If there is inevitable pain that comes from solitude, it may be the preface to peace, love, and joy. Rilke acknowledges that there will be those who stay behind, who cannot or will not enter into solitude. And so it is that although the invitation to solitude is offered to all, not everyone will accept. Still, Rilke cautions that those who’ve grown and benefited from solitude should be gentle with those who haven’t, for they haven’t understood or experienced the call to solitary living.

American Transcendentalist writer, Henry David Thoreau, went to live alone in the woods outside of Concord, Massachusetts to live deep and suck the marrow out of life, to live deliberately. Of his experience there, he wrote, I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. When I first moved to Iowa, I didn’t know a soul in my new community and actually didn’t speak to anyone for three, long weeks (except for two phones calls to my parents–I was poor and couldn’t afford the long-distance rates). Let it be said that at 26, I did not find solitude to be companionable. As I walked through town near the end of this three-week period, I’m sure I looked like a starved, crazed woman as I desperately tried to make meaningful eye contact with everyone I passed, hoping that someone would show pity and speak to me. Had I met Thoreau on the streets, I would’ve given him an earful about solitude.

Up to this point in my life, I’d never been alone for this long. Looking back, I’ve come to see that this period was the beginning of my own journey with solitude. A painful beginning, yes. A necessary beginning, absolutely. Through the decades, I’ve learned to live in companionable joy with solitude. I’ve learned that solitude, like a long love, deepens with time. Like Sarton, I’ve learned that the people we love are built into us, that even though we’re separated from them–by distance or by death–they live happily with us in solitude. And as I’ve aged, I’ve learned to enter solitude with great peace and expectation.