Fifty Days of Solitude

by Doris Grumbach

  SNOW: In mid January it arrived stealthily during the night while I slept. The first storm was merely half a foot, but it covered everything except, of course, the gray water of the cove and the protuberant rocks which were now black. It was as if a curtain had fallen on a colorful stage set and then risen on one entirely devoid of color, with only shapes to break the white monotony.

  It was a most fortunate turn of events. There was no impetus to go out, no desire to uncover my car from its white corset and cap, no need for air or exercise or the sight of other persons. The snow urged me inward, to the light over my desk, to the fire in the woodstove, toward the warm, inner core of self so insulated and protected from “going out” by the snow cover that it suggested something unexpected to write about and the right way to express it.

  I WORKED hard the day of the first storm, feeling very pure and in tune with the climate. I thought of what Annie Fields quoted (from Aristotle) to Willa Cather in a letter: “Virtue is concerned with action; Art with production.” I was not aspiring to art, but I managed to combine both virtue and production until, in the late afternoon, I was tired out. Then I filled the house with music from the last act of Tristan and Isolde, so loud that it obliterated the silent snow and made me feel less virtuous, less desirous of virginal ground cover and needy of some kind of warmth, some sexual reassurance. Oh well. I went up to my solitary bed, trying to hold fast to the virtues of art that flourishes in solitude and snow.

  THOMAS SZASZ (in The Second Sin): “Man cannot long survive without air, water, and sleep. Next in importance comes food. And close on its heels, solitude.”

  THE eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in A Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality among Men, thought ancient man was an introvert, modern man a social being. “The savage lives within himself, while social man lives constantly outside himself and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive consciousness of his own existence merely from the judgement of others concerning him.”

  I wondered if both these observations were true. What evidence do we have of early human self-sufficiency? Were there hermits? Tribal life, nomadic life did not seem to allow for much solitude. Anchorites, I believe, were a Christian phenomenon, following Jesus’ example of a long stay in the desert. I remembered that the trial the Maoris of New Zealand inflicted upon their young boys to prove their worthiness to enter manhood was a year alone in the wilderness, surviving all natural dangers and the more unnatural one of solitude. Such a rite of passage made a boy fit to live with the tribe. I wondered if it ever happened that it bred in him a hunger to continue to lead his life alone, in a perpetual walkabout.

  But how right Rousseau was about the modern person. Our points of reference are always our neighbors, the people in the village or the city, our acquaintances at school, at games, at work, our close and distant families, all of whom tell us, with their hundreds of tongues, who we are. We are what we were told we were, we believed what we heard from others about our appearance, our behavior, our choices, our opinions. We acted according to all their instructions. Rarely if ever did we think to look within for knowledge of ourselves. Were we afraid? Perhaps, we thought, we would find nothing there. Is a person missing, an entity that can only be formed from evidence provided by someone looking at us?

  We were determined by public opinions of us. Would we think we existed without outside confirmation? And how long could we live apart from others before we began to doubt our existence?

  The reason that extended solitude seemed so hard to endure was not that we missed others but that we began to wonder if we ourselves were present, because for so long our existence depended upon assurances from them.

  The pronouns I was using now, the generalized first person plural I used to think with in the world—we, us, our—came more easily to the pen when such matters as these suddenly concerned me. The first person pronoun makes a statement about our unique singularity of which we are only sure when we are in society. Alone, we hesitate to use it (as I am doing now) because we fear we may be talking behind the back of someone who is not there.

  One thing more: Searching for the self when I was entirely alone was hazardous. What if I found not so much a great emptiness as a space full of unpleasant contents, a compound of long-hidden truths, closeted, buried, forgotten. When I went looking, I was playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek, fearful of what I might find, most afraid that I would find nothing.

  THE LONG LONELINESS by Dorothy Day. When I was alone, I was attracted to that book by its title. Dorothy Day thought that the division between men and women could be made on the curious ground that “women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. A child is not enough. A husband and children, no matter how busy one may be kept by them, are not enough. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.”

  All this may be true for many women, for those who, in recent years, have flocked to groups offering to raise their consciousness, to workshops promising to teach them to write, to support groups for various afflictions and weaknesses. But for others, and especially for those like me who are “of a certain age,” the call to come to a circle inspires only an irresistible desire to walk away, to learn what I want to know in the quiet which can never be found in a group or a community, to practice in private.

  For too long women have existed in groups. The communities of families, of our husband’s professional associates, of gatherings of other wives and mothers left together after dinner to exchange wisdom about shopping, cooking, children. The long loneliness of which Dorothy Day speaks was felt by some of us only when we were with other people. What we yearned for were periods of solitude to renew our worn spirits.

  How seldom were most women alone, left alone. They went directly from a crowded childhood and young adulthood within the confines of a family to teeming dormitories at colleges and universities. Some avoided those crowds only to be given to husbands, handed over by fathers in a ceremony that emphasized the continuity of their communal existence. I lived more than half a century surrounded in this way.

  I recalled two brief periods when I lived alone, the first year of World War II when my husband was drafted, and then the half-year, thirty-one years later, when we separated. With dismay I remember how I wasted those short times: I did everything I could to avoid my empty rooms; I was lonely because I had no experience with solitude. I never realized I had been given a gift; I didn’t know how to use the great present of time alone. I read about it later in May Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”

  Very late, in fact during these fifty days, I discovered the new pleasures about which Jessamyn West (in Hide and Seek) wrote. “Alone, alone, oh! We have been warned about solitary vices. Have solitary pleasures ever been adequately praised? Do many people know that they exist?”

  DISTURBANCES to the pleasure of being alone:

  The first: taxes to be paid. The old year was over. I could empty my drawer of the year’s receipts and returned checks and start to figure deductions, expenses, income. A morning, then an afternoon, were lost thinking about how unprepared I was to encounter the weighty presence of the Internal Revenue Service in April. Then I was foolishly distracted from another morning’s work by suddenly realizing what odd proper nouns those were. Service? How was internal revenue a service? To whom? For what? It was during such persistent, irksome worries that the small gains of solitude were lost. The world outside flooded in and drowned me in feelings of inadequacy and a hundred slips of evidential paper.

  Next: misunderstandings. I had told people of my intention to be alone for a time. At once I realized they looked upon this declaration as a rejection of them and their company. I felt apologetic, even ashamed, that I would have wanted such a curiou
s thing as solitude, and then sorry that I had made a point of announcing my desire for it. I should have hidden the fact that I wished to be alone, “like a secret vice,” as Anne Morrow Lindbergh described it in Gift from the Sea.

  To the spouse, or the long-time companion, or the family, and to the social circle, as it is called, the decision to be alone for any length of time is dangerous, threatening, a sign of rejection. “You do not like me or my company.” “You are critical of me (us) and want the world to know about it.” Having never felt the need to be alone themselves, having always lived happily in relationships, they looked upon my need as eccentric, even somewhat mad. But more than that, they saw it as fraudulent, an excuse to be rid of them rather than a desperate need to explore myself.

  Last: page proofs of a book I had finished six months ago arrived in the middle of the fifty days. No interruption could have been more catastrophic. My isolation was flooded with errors, mistaken judgments, poor constructions, my quiet inundated with dubious opinions. In the midst of new work it was fatal to be reminded of the insufficient efforts of the past. I decided writers should be cut loose, violently, from their work when it comes out of the typewriter or the printer, the way a baby’s umbilicus is severed at its birth. In this way, all errors disappear from the writer’s memory, leaving the mind clear for better work, or more errors, but at least fresh ones. I had to subtract three days of solitude from the fifty I had planned in order to accommodate this intrusion.

  ALONE, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time. I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.

  I was interested in this question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations. I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to “share” (how I have come to hate the flat, soft, sentimental sound of that word) the experience. But I began to see in these weeks alone that a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced. The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing.

  BY chance, as I was considering this, I came upon Susanne K. Langer’s Problems of Art. She quotes the art critic Roger Fry’s view that, because of the needs of everyday existence, “the sense of vision becomes highly specialized in their service. We learn to see only what serves our immediate purposes, what we need to see. Useful objects ‘put on more or less the cap of invisibility,’ and are seen only so far as practicality allows.”

  But, he says, “it is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it.” This, in his terms, is “pure vision abstracted from necessity.”

  Langer thinks that the only way to separate pure vision from the fabric of real life is to create it, so that what I was looking at was “nothing but appearance,” the unreal becomes real because I have written it (or composed or painted it).

  Just recently I learned the truth of this. The real occupants of the house were the two young men I had put into my fiction, more actual than I was, the “real” tenants of my study and kitchen. I believed they were here and so I saw them far more clearly than the pictures of my grandchildren or drawings framed on the walls.

  Fry and Langer were not concerned with the fate of ordinary objects when, in quiet and isolation, I looked hard at them. But I found that interesting. They turned into new objects, seen in a curious, hard original light, no longer ordinary or familiar.

  ROBERT A. ROSENSTONE, Mirror in the Stone:

  A Japanese artist was commissioned by an American to do a painting. The completed work had, in a lower corner, the branch of a cherry tree with a few blossoms and a bird perched upon it. The entire upper half of the painting was white. Unhappily, the American asked the artist to put something else in the painting because it looked, well, so bare. The Japanese refused the request. When pressed for an explanation, the artist said if he did fill up the painting, there would be no space for the bird to fly.

  Many years ago I bought a colored etching from Donald Furst, an artist then living in Iowa. Called Into White, it is filled in the top seventh of the rectangular page with winter trees and distant snow-covered fields. The rest of the long sheet is white, untouched by any lines or colors, so that most of the work is blank, leaving a great deal of space for the snow to lie heavy and impenetrable on the ground. I went to my wall to look hard at Into White, at the pure snow of my imagination, the way the Japanese artist must have seen, clearly, the bird in flight.

  Another lesson learned in solitude: To look hard at what I did not notice before and even harder at what is not there, at what Paul Valéry called “the presence of absence.”

  MY solitude was, for a long time, untroubled because I had ruled out all news and thoughts of racial disturbance in cities and on campuses, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, social upheaval, civil wars, revolution, starvation, and homelessness everywhere. If I failed to read the newspaper or listen to the radio, they seemed not to exist.

  Nothing outside the house, beyond the woods and the cove, was happening. But that tranquil state did not last. In the third week I was informed, by letter, that Tracy Sampson’s brother Craig, who came to dinner at our house last fall, had died of AIDS in San Francisco. At the same time, in the mail, came word from Ed Kessler, my former colleague in the English department at American University, that his friend Jim, whom we had known well in Washington, had been murdered in Boston, presumably by some toughs he had befriended when he was ill. And a week later I learned that my small granddaughter Hannah was slated to have her skull cut open by a plastic surgeon to correct a slight birth defect on her forehead and one eye.

  Through the most minute crack, the catastrophes and tragedies of the world outside intruded upon the serenity of my life. A death by cruel virus, a murder by knife, an operation-to-come on a one-year-old relative have left their unmistakable mark, like the piste of a wild animal.

  LOOKING hard at what I had not noticed before—the shape of snow around the bird feeder where the feet of birds have tramped a wide circle in their search for fallen bird seed, the lovely V-shaped wake of a family of newly arrived eider ducks as they cross the cove, the sight of a green log sputtering and drooling sap in the woodstove as if in protest against my feeding it prematurely to the flames—was tiring. The weight of new experience, the storing of it on the front burner of my memory, and then recovering it for use in this record: all this took more energy than the old, careless, eyes-once-over-the-object practice.

  In these days alone, was I perhaps preparing myself for the final deep freeze, the eternal hibernation, the last, empty room, the eventual, never-to-be interrupted solitude: death? and the deaf-and-dumb, blind, under-restraints quietus: dying?

  SNOW again. Trees were reduced to white skeletons. Still there was a towering greatness to them, stretched to their great white heights. The little new crabapple tree was now a mere sketch. Familiar shapes were transformed into indecipherable humps, mounds, gravelike knolls, the “alabaster chambers,” as Emily Dickinson called them. It was hard to remember that under the blankness lived seeds, bulbs, and roots, perennial and phoenixlike, immortal in a way. It was only the deceptive appearance of death I was staring out at, which, after all, is not death at all.

  WOULD I have been as content alone if it were not for the beauty of this place? Was it true, as Sybil asserted time and again, that I cared more for the cove than for company? Would a prisoner be happier tied into a hut alone but within sight of the sea than if he were jailed in a windowless cell?

  I was reading E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End one evening when I came upon this interchange. M
argaret says: “It is sad to suppose that places may even be more important than people.”

  Helen asks: “Why, Meg? They’re so much nicer generally.…”

  Margaret: “I believe we shall come to care about people less and less, Helen. The more people one knows, the easier it becomes to replace them.”

  ONE early morning I came downstairs to make coffee. I sat before the kitchen window looking out to the black sea to watch the sunrise. Tired of waiting for it, I began to read, became engrossed, looked up after a while to find that streaks of brilliant yellow light had filled the sky over the reach. I was disappointed at having missed the moment when the spectacle arrived, the way one must feel if one has watched at a death bedside for a long time, gone out for a breath of air, and come back to find the beloved dead.

  The sky grew more startling—red, blue clouds, the horizon at Deer Isle almost black—and I watched for a while. But, despite the wonder of the sight, my interest waned again. I went back to the book I had been reading, Elizabeth Drew’s The Modern Novel, in which she says that “the test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.”

  No, I thought. At the moment I missed the sunrise by looking too closely at the printed page, I had diminished my life in a curious way. The intensity literature aroused in me, I believe, was often less than what happened when I listened to, felt, and saw the world around me.

  I FOUND there was a relation between cold and silence. The temperature in my bedroom at night was usually less than fifty degrees. The silence, the absence of another person, intensified the cold. The cold made the silence absolute. It seemed to lower the temperature of the room and to extend the size of it. Death is the great cold, I thought, and turned on the radio. Sound, I found, was somewhat warming, even the sound of a talkative host interrogating sleepless callers who wanted to air their views about the state of the world’s evils.