How to Be Alone (School of Life) (15 page)

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Authors: Sara Maitland

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BOOK: How to Be Alone (School of Life)

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More seriously, Annie Dillard’s beautiful book
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
(Canterbury Press, 2011 – new edition), which won a Pulitzer prize in 1975, addresses these issues and at the same time describes a solitary sojourn in a valley in Virginia, USA.

5. Learn Something by Heart

If you haven’t learned anything by heart since you left primary school, here are a few easy ‘starters’: your favourite poem (this is easiest if it rhymes, or at least has a strong regular rhythm); one of Shakespeare’s soliloquies; the 7 times table; the tube stations on the Circle Line; your regular telephone numbers in the order of most frequent use; (part of) Martin Luther King’s 1963 ‘I have a dream’ speech.

6. Going Solo

If you do not know anyone you can ask directly about solo adventures, there is a wonderful range of books. Here are my top ten (although I have left out some favourites because I have already described them elsewhere in this book). Some are novels.

The Long Way
by Bernard Moitessier (Doubleday, 1971). Moitessier was in many ways a natural ‘loner’, without any pejorative connotations. He was a French single-handed yachtsman and this book is an account of his nonstop solo circumnavigation. When he set out, it was as part of the first Golden Globe Race (which Robin Knox-Johnston won), at which point such a journey had never been accomplished, or even attempted. However, after about two-thirds of the journey, Moitessier decided that he did not want to win the race or even go back to Europe at all, so instead he just sailed on, completing another half-circuit until he reached Tahiti. The book is a lyrical, even mystical, account of the journey and the joys of solitude. It is worth noting that Moitessier was a very experienced and highly skilled sailor, and also a professional writer.

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe, 1719. This is fiction. It is also one of the great adventure stories of English literature, and is a profound meditation on solitude and both its positive and negative aspects. Of course, in the end Man Friday turns up and Crusoe is no longer alone. If you have only read one of the versions created for children you will be surprised.

Sea Room
by Adam Nicolson (HarperCollins, 2002). Nicolson’s father gave him three tiny islands off the west coast of Scotland called the Shiants. Here Nicolson traces their history and their ecology and the patterns of extraordinary and lonely lives lived on them. Although no one is actually ‘alone’ for very long, the islands themselves are so isolated and far away – not just in space but in atmosphere – that their very existence is somehow an adventure into solitude. Nicolson is a loving biographer and historian, and himself a visitor. Lovely and encouraging and hopeful.

Walking Home
by Simon Armitage (Faber & Faber, 2012). The poet Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way alone in 2010, and this is the account of his journey. It is not an ‘adventure’ in the sense that some of the other books are – although he made it more challenging by travelling as a troubadour, singing for his supper in pubs and other places en route. But it is a glorious, thoughtful, touching book about some of the pleasures of solitude and the beauties of hill walking.

A Woman in the Polar Night
by Christiane Ritter (trans. Jane Degras) (Allen & Unwin, 1954). It probably is not very useful to include this book, because it is very hard to get hold of – but there are so few adventure stories by women, and she writes so extraordinarily well about polar solitude, that I am including it anyway.

Rogue Male
by Geoffrey Household (1939, new edition, Orion, 2013). This classic thriller takes solitude to a new level. It is a great adventure story and an extraordinary meditation on solitude, freedom and survival. It is very exciting.

The High Lonesome: Epic Solo Climbing Stories,
ed. John Long (Falcon Press, 1999). I don’t get it myself, not really; solo rock climbing and mountaineering scare rather than excite me. I first read this to try and understand. Nonetheless Long has collected some thrilling and thoughtful accounts from a range of individuals who do enjoy this high and giddy solitude and are reflective enough to try and explain why.

The Places in Between
by Rory Stewart (Picador, 2004). Stewart walked across Afghanistan, alone, just after the Taliban had fallen. His book is an extraordinary mixture of politics, exploration, travel description and human endurance. It has an odd, rather endearing nineteenth-century feel about it – minimizing discomfort and danger, slightly self-mocking – and introduces a faithful hound. But he writes beautifully about places most of us will never go to. A real adventure.

A Voyage for Madmen
by Peter Nichols (Profile, 2001). Nichols’s book gives a full account of all nine entrants to the 1968–69
Sunday Times
Golden Globe Race. There were nine entrants, and only one finished. It provides a genuinely thrilling study of a range of different responses to extreme solitude. Sadly there were no women entrants.

There are of course many other stories of lone rangers – by air and sea, in exotic places and nearer home. After you have read some you should at least be willing to imagine a small adventure into solitude yourself.

7. Train the Children

I have already discussed Anthony Storr’s book
Solitude.
I particularly like the way he sees children as tough, as natural survivors, capable of turning even quite dark experiences into creative and nourishing channels. Richard Louv’s book
Last Child in the Woods
(Atlantic, 2009) is an impassioned plea for children to be allowed more experience of solitude, particularly outside in wilder places. The book is annoyingly American in some ways (there is rather a lot of pop psychology), but his evidence is thoroughly marshalled and the ‘child’ he describes seems to be much more realistic and attractive than the hyper-delicate, endangered, brittle child of too many child experts’ fantasies. Like me, he sees many of the problems that children are currently suffering as related to their lack of solitude – and he uses sociological and psychological research to prove the case; he is particularly persuasive on ADD (attention deficit disorder). Tim Gill, in
No Fear
(Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2007), takes a similar line in a more European context. It is on these books and others that I base my opinion that a lack of solitude – and especially solitude out of doors – is one cause of our children’s problems.

Both Philip Pullman and Jack Zipes have published modern translations of the Grimm Brothers’ collected fairy stories. I find these better for children than modern retellings, where too often the fear of being alone (along with any parental shortcomings) is written out to ‘protect’ the child.

Where the Wild Things Are
by Maurice Sendak, a picture book for very young children, is one of the best starting places for this sort of literature. It manages to be both funny and serious, the pictures are fabulous and the ‘hero’ victorious through his own courage.

8. Respect Difference

Recently there have been a number of books addressing this question of why extroversion seems to be valued so much more highly than introversion. Susan Cain’s
Quiet: The power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking
(Penguin, 2012) is a popular example and there are many others. My difficulty with most of these books is that they completely accept the totalizing binary division, but simply favour the opposite side: ‘it is entirely wonderful to be an introvert and you are somehow superior to the extroverts’. The Myers–Briggs Personality tests, which make introversion and extroversion a key division, and social dependence on them, have reinforced this oppositional approach. Nonetheless there are interesting differences and they are worth knowing more about.

IV. The Joys of Solitude

1. Consciousness of the Self

Although ‘take a yoga class’ does not, at first sight, look like homework for solitude, learning the techniques of stillness and awareness really does help to make solitude more comfortable and easier. Yoga is the most accessible of these techniques and can, more than many other religious approaches to meditation, like those of Christianity and Sufism, be separated from its undergirding spiritual theory.

3. Relationship with the Transcendent

There are a vast number of books and films, both serious anthropological studies and sensationalist reportage, about rites of passage.
Anthropology: A Beginner’s Guide
by Joy Hendry and Simon Underdown (Oneworld, 2012) seems to me a good introduction; it discusses other forms of solitude and their meanings, and places these ritual practices into a wider social context. It is well-referenced if you want to follow anything up.

4. Creativity

Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929, new edition: Penguin, 2002) is a famous feminist text. It is also a flamboyant, funny and clever polemic, which is well worth reading if you want to think about creativity, especially in the arts.

For people with no maths (like me) who would like to understand more about the explosive creative period in the 1920s when quantum mechanics was ‘discovered’, including Heisenberg’s contribution, I have written a story called ‘On Sneezing an Uncertain Sneeze’ in a collection entitled
Moss Witch and Other Stories
(Comma, 2013). All the fictional stories in the book are about science and are accompanied by mini-essays by eminent scientists. Jim Al-Khalili has written ‘Three Years That Changed Physics Forever’ to go with my story, explaining what Heisenberg and his colleagues were up to and why it mattered so much.

5. Freedom

The Stations of Solitude
(Bantam, 1991) by Alice Koller is a book about self-discovery through solitude.

About the Author

S
ARA
M
AITLAND
is the British author of numerous works of fiction, including the Somerset Maugham Award–winning
Daughter of Jerusalem,
and several nonfiction books, including
A Book of Silence.
Born in 1950, she studied at Oxford University and lives in Galloway, Scotland.

WWW.SARAMAITLAND.COM

Photographic Credits

The author and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce the images used in this book:

Sara’s cottage
© Adam Lee Photography

Woman Spinning Thread,
from
Forty-Three Drawings of Neapolitan Costumes,
by Costanzo Castelli, 1786
© Newberry Library / SuperStock

Ellen MacArthur Solo World Record Attempt
© Liot Vapillion / DPPI via Getty Images

Greta Garbo in
Queen Christina,
1933
© MGM / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

Edinburgh New Town
© David Robertson / Retna

Girl looking through train window
© Jekaterina Nikitina / Getty Images

Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
© Dongyu Gatsal Ling Nunnery

The Wedding Dance,
c.1566 (oil on panel), by Bruegel, Pieter the Elder (c.1525–69)
© Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / City of Detroit Purchase / The Bridgeman Art Library

Shearing the Rams,
1890 (oil on canvas), by Thomas William Roberts (1856–1931)
© National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia / The Bridgeman Art Library