...And there she was, encamped in the front reading room, chatting and smoking.  My heart did a little dance. My eyes blinked from surprise and relief, to see her again. She seemed spot-lit and radiant as I slow-walked past her, urging myself to stop, but not stopping. 
Read More

Thomas Wolfe wrote You Can’t Go Home Again. What are the frustrations if you try?
Read More

 

Solitude liberated me from isolation and mediocrity.

For me, isolation results from a feeling of imprisonment.  I have felt physically isolated in a crowd, at a bar, in a faculty meeting or even in the exercise gym where I am the weakest and slowest.

For me, solitude is self-chosen: a personal path to exploring myself and recognizing the values of others.  My cherished experiences are entering a secluded national forest in the fall. Sitting crossed legged, I listen to the birds, treasure the many colors of the fall trees, watch an occasional snake taking its last bask in the warm sun before gracefully weaving into its winter asylum, and feeling the cool atmosphere change from warm to chill…  

Complementing my physical satisfaction, I reach into my backpack for a collection of reading.  Dominant are the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, and Saul Bellow.  I read them not necessarily for their meaning—Buber’s I and Thou, Kafka’s The Great Wall of China, and Langston Hughes’ autobiography, I Wonder as I Wander.  Their themes and significance have been explained too many times.

Rather, in solitude their writings inspire me to achieve a meaningful life despite challenges and disappointment. Buber chose his own path to religious studies, pacifism, and cosmopolitanism despite the Nazis.  He left the usual academic world to study Chinese, argued in correspondence with Gandhi about the application of non-violence for the German Jews, initially refused to exit Palestinian Jerusalem during the War of Independence, and suffered rejection from an appointment in Jewish studies at Hebrew University for an inappropriate position in Sociology.

Kafka, though not an observant Jew, was the quintessential Jewish writer.  His fecundity of Jewish stories such as the Golem, the Kabbalah, and Jacob’s ladder, were reflected in his writings—such as The Trial, and The Metamorphosis.

 The Burrow, left unfinished before he died, introduced a cryptic unnerving story about a being that burrows through a system of tunnels that it has built over its lifetime. The creature is constantly afraid of something happening to his burrow or being attacked from an enemy. It is thought that the story was supposed to have concluded with the invasion of a beast that disrupts the system.

For Kafka, his writings could not possibly communicate what he wanted. In his will he ordered that they, like him, be extinguished. Although he avoided the coming Nazi genocide, his wife disappeared, also, into the abyss of the concentration camps.

 

                           

Reading in solitude invests me with a spiritual companionship

I cannot obtain from crowds.