Imagine to Remember

Loneliness may be the defining experience of our time but solitude remains a rarity, this is one the paradoxical truths of our age. Loneliness today is more than just a physical or even spiritual separation because it is accompanied by something else, the ever present force of distraction and temptation from our many devices. So while we are often alone physically we are unable to receive the gifts the only solitude can provide. Guy Debord called this the “spectacle”, the replacing of real life with its representation. And the spectacle is everywhere. Even when we are alone we cannot escape it and so we never feel “at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”⁣⁣. We perform for an unseen audience, entirely at its mercy and ever aware of its gaze upon us. This makes solitude impossible. Silence has not only become strange but despised, something to banish, it makes us uneasy, but in the constant buzz of our devices we are soothed. 

My reason for seriously considering solitude is entirely selfish. For many weeks I have found myself unable to write. When I first began to take seriously my writing it seemed like ideas were an endless supply. Ideas just occurred to me, like visitations from the unknowable beyond. Entire sentences fully formed seemed to just appear in my mind. At other times, the idea seemed like a grainy picture or an amorphous blob without definition. I would turn over and over in my mind for days or even weeks, labouring in solitude, until the image, the form fully crystallized emerged out of me with edges and boundaries of its own, became its own thing, a thing I could then hold and direct. 

One of the definitions of solitude is “an uninhabited place”, bringing to the hearts eye images of forests and deserts. But what is out there is ultimately in us, and there are these same uninhabited places of our own souls. Solitude is our way into these unknown places. It is the journey to these places that we call creativity or spirituality. Without it, there are parts of ourselves that will always remain a mystery, entire worlds just beyond that closed door.