Quotes: On lonerism

When geniuses self-isolate:

Peter Higgs is not a fan of modern technology, said Decca Aitkenhead in The Guardian (U.K.) The British theoretical physicist, 84, is so consumed with work that he has never sent an email, looked at the Internet, or used a cellphone. He's so cut off from modes of modern communication that he didn't know he'd won this year's Nobel Prize in physics--for his 1964 paper predicting the Higgs boson, which imbues other particles with mass--until a neighbor congratulated him on the street. His son did buy him a mobile phone two months ago, but he has yet to make a call, and no one outside his family knows his number. "I resent being disturbed in this way," says Higgs. "Why should people be able to interrupt me like that?" Because they want to keep in touch? "But I don't want to be in touch," he laughs. It's an intrusion into my way of life, and certainly on principle I don't feel obliged to accept it."
"The hermit physicist." The Week, Dec. 27, 2013. p. 8.

Anneli Rufus noted that the psychopath warning list usually includes isolation/loner:

Yeah, but that could also be on a list of ways to identify a genius.
Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 259.

On needing privacy for the creative process:

When I went upstairs a third time--the Bunker bathroom needed extra toilet paper--This Guy said, without looking up, "Go the fuck downstairs and write already."
So I did. I emerged toward dawn and slid into bed next to him with immense gratitude. In the morning, I told him I'd forgotten he was there.
"The ultimate compliment," he said.
I think you can balance writing and a relationship. It helps to have a room of your own...
"The Writer's Life: Advice from the Bunker." Jenna Blum. The Grub Street Free Press. Fall 2004. Vol 1, Issue 2. p. 13.

"'When I talk about my work,' she once told me 'it skids and shatters and gets away.' To this day, I never ask a writer what he or she is 'doing.'"
Perdita Schaffner (daughter of the author). In the introduction to H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] The Gift. New York: New Directions, 1982. p. x.

On occasionally seeking company:

"But you're not a child and don't have a child's needs," he said without a trace of admonition. "A child is in danger without company because it's helpless, but an adult has access to any need imaginable: food, medicine, companionship. All an adult has to do is to pick up the phone and call a doctor or drive to the supermarket or meet a friend for coffee."
Barbara Feldon. Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Single Life. New York: Fireside, 2003. pp. 22-23.

“Here is a student, the interviewer told the Harvard admissions committee in his report about the conversation, ‘who has 'fit in' in two places in a short time, and is not a loner (in a circumstance where it could easily happen).’"
Julie Zauzmer. Conning Harvard. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2012. p. 57

Quotes on simplicity

Kierkegaard — according to Merold Westphal — "published a long review of a Danish novel [Two Ages] which appeared just as he was concluding his own book [Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing] and which fascinated him by providing an occasion for dealing with some of the same themes in a different setting." In the review, he "introduces inertia as a physical metaphor for the spiritual resistance to that dying to immediacy that the sacred seems to demand of us."
Quoting: Merold Westphal. God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion. (1984) Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987. p. 52.

"Love is greater than anything — love and Lady Poverty. Poverty is like a gift and a dependence. Everything for God and others. That’s above institutions, above permissions, above constitutions, and we need a taste of it; somewhere, somehow, we have to feel the ardor of it again."
The character of a priest in Michael Novak's novel The Tiber Was Silver, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co, 1961. p. 85.

"Complexity is just simplicity which refuses to be anything else."
poet Nayyirah Waheed, quoted in "Time and Time Again: An interview with Farah Salem," Sixty Inches From Center, April 2022

“The trouble about man is twofold: He cannot learn truths which are too complicated; he forgets truths which are too simple.”
Rebecca West, quoted in The Wall Street Journal, quoted in The Week, Sept. 27, 2013. p. 17.

"...[on Shabbat] I do not use money, do not spend time on any tasks related to my work as editor of Tikkun, and do not engage in any activity that would exert dominion or control over nature. This practice helps me foster and strengthen my understanding of the abundance that already is there."
Michael Lerner. The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right. HarperSanFrancisco, 2006. p. 316.

“The silence grew, becoming a kind of presence in the room.”
James Carroll. The Cloister. Nan A. Talese, March 6, 2018.

"The substance of a work is the impossible — what we have not been able to attain, what could not be given to us: the sum of all the things which were refused us."
E. M. Cioran. The Trouble With Being Born. (1973)(Trans. by Richard Howard.) New York: Arcade, 2012.

Quotes on the benefits of quiet, solitary reflection to connect with oneself

"What we do during our working hours determines what we have; what we do during our leisure hours determines what we are."
Philanthropist George Eastman, quoted in the Buffalo Law Journal, quoted in The Week, June 14, 2013, p. 19.

"When you stop thinking about yourself all the time, a certain sense of repose overtakes you."
Leonard Cohen, quoted in the Montreal Gazette, quoted in The Week, Dec. 21, 2012, p. 15.

"What solitary icebergs we are, Miss Vinrace! How little we can communicate!"
Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

"Silence is the cornerstone of character."
Ohhiyesa, Santee Sioux. Quoted in Sharon Franquemont. You Already Know What to Do: 10 Invitations to the Intuitive Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000. p. 117.

”Like most deadly attractive people, he had a hollow at the center of him. What people loved most about her husband was how mellifluous their own voices sounded when they echoed back.”
Lauren Groff. Fates and Furies. New York: Riverhead, 2015.

”And why does the nightmare described by the Internet, of encountering people who look and sound real but are fake, remind you so much of the feeling of reading the Internet itself?”
Kristin Dombek. The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism. FSG Originals, 2016.

"Noise is an imposition on sanity, and we live in very noisy times."
Joan Baez, quoted in the Toronto Star, quoted in The Week, May 18, 2012, p. 19.

With that epiphany [that someone might hurt me because they don't understand me] comes the shock of realizing that there is an inside and an outside, and the artist is outside. Not by will. By blood. By a force beyond understanding, no more mutable than the fact that one breathes. A shock. The knowledge that one is alone in the world. Alone in mind, in mission if not in flesh. All alone, neither able to answer to any boss besides oneself nor willing. Forever alone, a thrill and an awesome responsibility. And life from then on is a party of one.”
Anneli Rufus. Party of One: The Loner's Manifesto. Da Capo Press, 2003. p. 119.

"There are a variety of ways to descend into desolation. Some people drift hither and thither slowly like autumn leaves, only half aware that they are lifeless and at the beck and call of the winds. Others plummet like frostbitten apples, bruising their flesh against every passing branch and knocking themselves senseless as they hit the ground. Others again are like chestnuts for whom a fall is a revelation. At the moment of impact the spiked shell breaks open and ejects a new shimmering kidney brown self."
Nina FitzPatrick. Daimons. Boston: Justin, Charles & Co, 2003. pp. 44-45.

"Remember, loneliness is still time spent with the world."
Poet Ocean Vuong, quoted in Mashable.com, quoted in The Week, Jan. 13, 2017, p. 17.

"I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out until sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in."
John Muir, quoted in Kay Redfield Jamison, Exuberance: The Passion for Life. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. p. 24.

"I set the skull down on the table and lean back to look at it. The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface, but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void.

There is a sadness about it, an inherent pathos. I have no words for it.

— Haruki Murakami, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

More quotes on solitude

"Loneliness is not death. Yet we might as well be dead when our only possibility is to be alone, because the worst aspect of loneliness is that it ends the possibility of meaningful experience by translating the inner dialogue of solitude into a monologue of desolation. As the quintessential condition of singularity, loneliness is unlike the condition of solitude, although, unless the world becomes so bleak as to be irremediable to us, we hold out the hope that we may emerge from loneliness into solitude. In solitude, we are each of us by our self, but not yet alone, because we are more or less happily occupied with our self, beside our self in a positive way, or in Arendt’s term, two-in-one. To move from loneliness to solitude is to recover the world we have lost."
— Thomas Dumm. Loneliness as a Way of Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008. pp. 40-41.

...beyond strategic / activist self preservation, there’s something else to be gained here: Doing nothing teaches us how to listen. I’ve already mentioned literal listening, or Deep Listening, but this time I mean it in a broader sense. To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.
— Jenny Odell, "how to do nothing," Medium: Culture, 29 June 2017

A few quotes on solitude

"We ruin our trips by a fateful habit of taking ourselves along on them. There’s a tragi-comic irony at work: the vast labour of getting ourselves physically to a place won’t necessarily get us any closer to the essence of what we seek."
— “On Confinement.” The Book of Life. Accessed March 23, 2020.

"People who cannot bear to be alone are generally the worst company."
— Albert Guinon

"...self-respect is often found to exist in inverse proportion to public status. It has learned to pass nights alone. It does not seek approval because it knows that estimation has nothing to do with achievement."
— Will Eaves. Murmur. Bellevue, 2019.

"The most profound relationship we'll ever have is the one with ourselves."
— Shirley MacLaine, quoted in HuffingtonPost.com, quoted in The Week, Sept. 27, 2013. p. 17.

"The very solitude of their lives as hermits led the Desert Fathers to discover that we are like others not in our virtues and strengths, but precisely in our faults, our failings, our flaws."
— Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham. The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning. (1992) New York: Bantam, 2002. p. 48.

"No other character in Greek myth is as alone as Sisyphus with a mountain all to himself in the underworld. Even Hades and Persephone do not visit, afraid of Sisyphus notorious trickery. And yet, I agree with Camus wholeheartedly: Sisyphus is surely happy. He has accepted his solitude, and he has a rock to roll."
— Jacob Falkovich. "Lonelinesses." Put a Number On It. May 21, 2019.

Celibacy as service and as self-development

Some people worry about sexual abstinence as a matter of personal moral purity, but it is a different matter to cast it in the light of a form of service to others. James Hinton wrote: "The man who separated the thought of chastity from Service and made it revolve round Self betrayed the human race." Raquel Isabelle de Alderete wrote, "Instead of worrying about people's 'purity' and how it defines them as a person, worry instead about how you can protect other people's emotions." Relationships – particularly marriage and child-rearing – take a lot of time. Rabbi Ben-Asai, second century CE, explaining why he shouldn't have to marry and procreate, said: "What can I do? My soul clings to the Torah. The world can be maintained by other people." But the people who do that form of world-maintenance will develop knowledge and skills about relationships that can only be imagined by those who do not personally participate in their own instance of such a relationship. In other words, lifelong celibates are not ideally positioned to dole out marriage and family advice. Uta Ranke-Heinemann wrote: "If only the Church's celibates would stop using the confessional to meddle in matters that don't concern them..." The nature of the service enabled by celibacy is to be defined.

Then again, there is a way of understanding celibacy as a focus on the self without having it be narcissistic. Celibacy can be an intentional part of personal development. Barbara Feldon wrote: "Lovers may leave us, husbands and wives may die, friends can move away, but creativity is faithfully ours if we honor our solitude by diving to realms that are deeper, freer and more complete than our surface lives. Once we know the way we can home to it anytime we wish – if we make the first mark." Sometimes that solitude is needed, not to demonstrate superiority to oneself or to others, but simply to grow.

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Sources

James Hinton, unpublished manuscript. Quoted in Havelock Ellis. On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue. Two Volumes in One. New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc. 1937. (Formerly Little Essays of Love and Virtue, 1921, and More Essays of Love and Virtue, 1931.) Vol. 1, p. 45.

R.I.D (Raquel Isabelle de Alderete). We Don't Have a Compass but I'm Sure We'll Find Home: A Collection of Poems. 2015.

Rabbi Ben-Asai, quoted in the Talmud, bYabmuth 63b, quoted by Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality, and the Catholic Church. Trans. Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 45.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1990. p 198.

Barbara Feldon. Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Single Life. New York: Fireside, 2003. p. 159.