Two Sides of One Coin: Loneliness and Solitude

This sermon was given to the Unitarian Fellowship of Houston, November 6, 2022.

When we were at the height of quarantining and distancing, many philosophers and historians had their moment in the sun: they were the people who studied loneliness and solitude. They spent their time thinking deeply about the history and development of the concept of loneliness, and the idea that loneliness was something that developed over time really interested the media and they gobbled up tons of writing from these scholars. I’m going to talking today about the work of three of these people: Fay Bound Alberti, the author of A Biography of Loneliness; Amelia Worsley, author of When Loneliness was New; and Jane Clark, the founding editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies. All three wrote extensively in the covid period on loneliness.

In 2020, there was a media frenzy after the UK appointed a minister of loneliness. Loneliness was worse than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, said the former U.S. Surgeon General. It was and is a public health issue, something that I think is pretty unique in our history of medical ailments, for the simple fact that loneliness is NOT considered an ailment at all.

But if it is a medical condition, then what exactly IS loneliness? And why is it here, now?

Modern loneliness isn’t just about being physically removed from other people, although that’s often a piece of it. It’s about *feeling* apart from other people, often feeling an ocean away. Someone can be surrounded by people, or even accompanied by friends and family and still be lonely. The abstraction, the mystery of why and how someone can feel lonely in any place or at any time, is pretty frightening. And we know that it’s more prevalent than ever. How do you deal with such a debilitating epidemic that is also an abstract?

Loneliness is actually not an old concept, which I found very surprising when I was researching for this sermon! Amanda Worsley wrote that people were perhaps solitary before the 19th century, and could be obsessive, like the Desert Fathers of the early Christian era who would live alone for decades, meditating on the Trinity and communing with God. But when Robinson Crusoe was cast adrift for years on a desert island in 1719, he was never once described as lonely. Why?

In Paradise Lost, John Milton actually describes one of the first lonely characters in all of British literature: Satan. But it’s not what you think! Satan is described as treading “lonely steps” on his way to Eden. He’s crossing the ultimate wilderness, the space between Hell and Earth, where no angel had gone before. He does describe his loneliness in terms of vulnerability but it’s a physical danger in a wild place, very different than what we call loneliness today.

“Loneliness” was included in a 1674 compilation of the most rarely used English words. Because it only meant that one was far from neighbors of some kind.

So, back in the 18th century, loneliness was apparently very rare and also very easy to cure — just go be with people, dummy! I know that a book’s definitions of words seems kind of a simplistic way to imagine the meaning of words in the past but Fay Alberti says this is not word play at all. The history of emotions is a well-established academic field that traces how emotions have changed over time, as well as the language used to describe them. The concept of loneliness probably did not exist before the modern era of the 19th century. For loneliness to exist, we need two things: a lack of meaning, or just a lack completely, in relationships, and a sense of yourself as separate from other people in the first place. In pre-modern society, religion gave meaning to all existence, and there was much less emphasis on the individual, who was of course always connected to their god or gods in some way. Alexander Pope wrote in 1731 “God and Nature link’d the general frame/and bade self-love and social love be the same.” An invisible hand had the wheel — God — and so someone was always with us; no one could be alone.

By the next century, “modernity” had brought uncertainty along with freedom. Social lives, economic structures, philosophy…all were re-created in the Enlightenment to make new ways of looking at the world and our place within it. Urbanization disrupted traditional communities and created physical distance and competition with each other. Philosophy searched for meaning without a God. This is when loneliness arose, and it has become more widespread over time.

Understanding loneliness as a product of history, rather than just a biological response, is important; it’s not just us, but a lot of things that we can’t control, which aid in loneliness. But also knowing that loneliness has become a profoundly human experience that anyone can have, can lead us towards cures for loneliness. There are many strategies: sharing loneliness with others, admitting to feelings of loneliness, reading about it in literature, perhaps even harnassing our feelings towards the creation of art or good works — these are all types of cures for loneliness. But there is one cure that is different.

Poet Marianne Moore said that the true cure for loneliness…is solitude.

This turns us towards the other side of the coin: solitude, which, while it has the same basic components of loneliness (ie, being alone or feeling alone), evokes an entirely different set of feelings and outcomes than loneliness. Loneliness is being alone when you have not chosen to be. The defining factor of solitude is that it is being alone by choice — like Frog on his island in “Alone”, by Arnold Lobel. Frog leaves a note to Toad that he wants to be alone, and he goes to sit on his own little island, just to enjoy the day.

The voices we hear [clearly] in solitude…grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.

— Thoreau

Jane Clark, while writing about solitude, explains that solitude is not just a matter of being physically alone; it is a state of mind, an attitude that embraces the possibilities that open up when we are away from the pressures of society and other people. No wonder it is easy to find yourself lonely when you could be solitary — achieving a state of mind is not always easy at all. Poor Toad couldn’t do it! He was frantically trying to stop being alone! He made food and forced a turtle to take him to the island to try to find Frog. He was the very embodiment of loneliness, in opposition to Frog’s calm solitude.

The Romantic poets of the 19th century loved solitude. Wordsworth who wandered lonely as a cloud, Byron who said “I only go out to get me a fresh appetite for being alone,” Coleridge and Shelley. They saw the pursuit of solitude as the pursuit of a state of mind, floating like clouds and being free in their thoughts, roaming without being tied to dogma or expectation.

Of course, our own Henry David Thoreau created a solitary life for himself at Walden Woods. Many of the Romantic and Transcendentalists thought that nature represented a chance for a human to feel small and alone, yet also a part of something very great, immense, and powerful. Thoreau wrote “We need the tonic of wildness…we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because they are unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features…living and decaying trees, the thunder-cloud and the rain that lasts three weeks and produces floods.”

The thing that these writers bring to us, most of all, is that the sensations and emotions we find when we are alone are important and valid, they constitute real knowledge about ourselves in the world. It doesn’t require outside authority to be true, and it is open to everyone and accessible always. Perhaps that’s another main difference between solitude and loneliness — when we are lonely, we are silently begging someone to acknowledge our worth. When we are in solitude, we require no other person to validate us. Again, I think of Toad, waving his hat and yelling to be noticed while Frog has simply left a note saying he’ll be back later. When Toad realizes that Frog is actually happy, not lonely, Toad realizes that his own loneliness was really something he made up for himself, and Frog hadn’t been gone at all.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote “The voices we hear in solitude…grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.”

Marianne Moore expands on this: “it is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great person is they who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

So in any exploration of what it means to be in a state of solitude, rather than simply alone or lonely, it is to explore being in contact with our self in its most profound depths. Our modern access to privacy and personal space, which is novel in the history of people, brings privilege.

Philip Larkin, in his poem Best Company, describes the relief of solitude very well:

Viciously, I shut the door.

The gas fire breathes. The wind outside

Ushers in evening rain. Once more

Uncontradicting solitude

Supports me on its giant palm;

And like a sea-anemone

Or simple snail, there cautiously

Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

Don’t let yourself forget that God’s grace rewards not only those who never slip, but also those who bend and fall. So sing! The song of rejoicing softens hard hearts. Happy praises offered in simplicity and love lead the faithful to complete harmony, without discord. Don’t stop singing.“

– Hildegard of Bingen

In solitude we can slowly unmask the illusion of our possessiveness and
discover in the center of our own self that we are not what we can conquer, but what is given to us. In solitude we can listen to the voice of him who spoke to us before we could speak a word, who healed us before we could make any gesture to help, who set us free long before we could free others, and who loved us long before we could give love to anyone. It is in this solitude that we discover that being is more important than having, and that we are worth more than the result of our effort. In solitude we discover that our life is not a possession to be defended, but a gift to be shared. It’s there we recognize that the healing words we speak are not just our own, but are given to us; that the love we can express is part of a greater love, and that the new life we bring forth is not a property to cling to, but a gift to be received.

From Out of Solitude by Henri Nouwen

We often don’t choose to be one thing or the other, though, and loneliness can creep up on us even if we think we’re pretty good at avoiding it. I would argue that all the cures for loneliness I have seen boil down to one thing: being in community. Not just around other people, but with other people. Feeling as though you are really present with other people in your life. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically with them, but it definitely means being mindful and in the moment with the people you are interacting with. And maybe being a little vulnerable with those people, too. The chalice lighting today was by Albert Schweitzer, who said that sometimes our own light goes out and we need it rekindled by someone else. That’s community — reaching out to help rekindle each other’s sparks when we see that others need help. Our congregational reading was by Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century saint who wrote some of the most compelling choral music of the middle ages, and who was also a philosopher and a healer. She was also an Abbess, holding together a large population of nuns devoted to the Benedictine Rule in central Germany. The reading from her reminds us that even when we feel we should be silent, because we have fallen or given up, instead we must sing and rejoice. She never lived apart from anyone; she spent her whole life in community with other women, building and sharing and singing together. Her advice to sing, has to be interpreted as singing TOGETHER. And even our meditation by Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest who worked tirelessly for social justice, implores us to use solitude to recognize that our lives are not possessions to be guarded, but a gift to be shared. Shared with others. Hildegard and Henri both admit that it often takes bravery to be part of a community, but it’s also the greatest cure we can give ourselves when we are lonely. I hope we all can keep ourselves open to that possibility.