Alone, I discovered myself looking hard at things, as if I were seeing them for the first time, or seeing them properly for the first time. I wondered if solitude promoted this activity, or whether it was a result of having more time for everything, more time to look and see, more to concentrate on what I was seeing.
I was interested in this question because so often in the past I had thought it preferable to be accompanied to the theater, to the opera, to the ballet, on travels and vacations. I had thought that there was a value to having someone along to 'share' (how I have come to hate the flat, soft, sentimental sound of that word) the experience. But I began to see in these weeks alone that a greater value lay in hearing and seeing from within that mysterious inner place, where the eyes and ears of the mind are insulated from the need to communicate to someone else what I experienced. The energy necessary to express myself to someone else seemed to have been conserved for the harder look, the keener hearing.
Fifty Days of Solitude: A Memoir (1994)
Use the link below to read The View from 90,
a 2011 essay about solitude and the aging process by DORIS
GRUMBACH:
You might also enjoy:
No comments:
Post a Comment