Most of the time, the most important things can be found in the gaps, the empty spaces – synapses between nerve cells; the gap between thoughts and words (read between the lines); meditation in solitude.
The best thing fishing taught me, I think, was how to be alone. Without this ability no writer can really survive or work, and there is a strong relationship between the activity of the fisherman, letting his line down into the unknown depths in the hope of catching an unseen prey (which may be worth keeping, or may not) and that of the writer trolling his memory and reflections for unexpected jags and jerks of association. O beata solitudo – o sola beatudo! Enforced solitude, as solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people’s amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the world’s great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at. Our culture puts enormous emphasis on “socialization,” on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others: the psychologically “successful” person is less an individual than a citizen, linked by a hundred cords and filaments to his or her fellow-humans and discovering fulfillment in relations with others. This belief becomes coercive, and in many cases tyrannous or even morbid, in a society like the United States, with its accursed, anodyne cults of togetherness. But perhaps as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr pointed out, solitude may be a greater and more benign motor of creativity in adult life than any number of family relations, love affairs, group identifications, or friendships. We are continually beleaguered by the promise of what is in fact a false life, based on unnecessary reactions to external stimuli. Inside every writer, to paraphrase the well-worn mot of Cyril Connolly, an only child is wildly signaling to be let out. “No man will ever unfold the capacities of his own intellect,” wrote Thomas DeQuincey, “who does not at least checker his life with solitude.”
– from Things I Didn’t Know by Robert Hughes (pp. 108-109)
In solitude we can focus on our being and, in a dialectic manner, our non-being. Life confronts us with problems, and ‘we’ are, most often, the source of those problems. Considerable efforts are expended in trying to remove that source from our consciousness. Solitude is difficult and the quiet leaves us restless because we must confront ourselves. No solution we imagine can still maintain our own existence.
In Richard II, Scene 5, Shakespeare writes:
“Nor I, nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing.”
Meditation in solitude becomes prayer out of sheer necessity.