Solitude. Anthony Storr
place, where one no longer does the same thing at the same time each day, cues from the environment either disappear or lose some of their significance.
Holidays arc escapes from the routine of ordinary day-to-day existence. When we feel in need of a holiday, we often refer to needing ‘a change’. Holidays and the capacity to change march hand in hand. The word ‘retreat’ carries similar overtones of meaning. Although retreat in the face of the enemy may precede defeat, it does not necessarily do so: reculer pour mieux sauter applies to a variety of mental and physical manoeuvres including sleep, rest, and recreation. The word ‘retreat’ itself may be used to indicate a period of time, and by extension a place, which is especially designed for religious meditation and quiet worship. The Retreat was the name given to one of the most famous British mental hospitals, founded in 1792 and still flourishing, in which the pioneer Samuel Tuke instituted a regime of tolerance, kindness, and minimum restraint By providing a safe ‘asylum’ from the harassments of the world, it was hoped that salutary change in the disturbed minds of the mentally ill would come about.
This, too, was the concept underlying the ‘rest cure’ for mental disturbances promoted by Silas Weir Mitchell, an American neurologist who practised during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Its twentieth-century successor was ‘continuous narcosis’, a technique of keeping patients asleep by means of drugs for twenty or more hours out of the twenty-four. As we have seen, drugs, by inhibiting REM sleep, tend to prevent sleep from knitting up ‘the ravell’d sleave of care’ as effectively as it does unaided, which may be one reason why this treatment is no longer in use.
Both the ‘rest cure’ and continuous narcosis involved removal from relatives and partial isolation. Today, the fact that isolation can be therapeutic is seldom mentioned in textbooks of psychiatry. The emphasis is upon group participation, ‘milieu therapy’, ward meetings, staff-patient interaction, occupational therapy, art therapy, and every other means which can be devised of keeping the mentally ill constantly occupied and in contact with one another as well as with doctors and nurses. In the case of schizophrenic patients, who are too easily inclined to lose contact with the external world altogether, this ceaseless activity is probably beneficial. I am less persuaded of its value in depressed patients; and regret that the average mental hospital can make little provision for those patients who want to be alone and who would benefit from being so.
That solitude promotes insight as well as change has been recognized by great religious leaders, who have usually retreated from the world before returning to it to share what has been revealed to them. Although accounts vary, the enlightenment which finally came to the Buddha whilst he was meditating beneath a tree on the banks of the Nairanjana river is said to have been the culmination of long reflection upon the human condition. Jesus, according to both St Matthew and St Luke, spent forty days in the wilderness undergoing temptation by the devil before returning to proclaim his message of repentance and salvation. Mahomet, during the month of Ramadan, each year withdrew himself from the world to the cave of Hera. St Catherine of Siena spent three years in seclusion in her little room in the Via Benincasa during which she underwent a series of mystical experiences before entering upon an active life of teaching and preaching.
Contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain. The telephone is an ever-present threat to privacy. In cities, it is impossible to get away from the noise of motor traffic, aircraft, or railways. This, of course, is not a new problem. City streets, before the invention of the automobile, may, intermittently, have been even noisier than our own. The iron-bound wheels of carts travelling over cobbles make more noise than rubber tyres on asphalt. But the general continuous level of noise in cities is constantly increasing, despite the attempts of legislation to curb it.
Indeed, noise is so ubiquitous that many people evidently feel uncomfortable in its absence. Hence, the menace of ‘Muzak’ has invaded shops, hotels, aircraft, and even elevators. Some car drivers describe driving as relaxing, simply because they are alone and temporarily unavailable to others. But the popularity of car radios and cassette players attests the widespread desire for constant auditory input; and the invention of the car telephone has ensured that drivers who install it are never out of touch with those who want to talk to them. In the next chapter, we shall look at some aspects of ‘sensory deprivation’. As noise abatement enthusiasts have discovered, its opposite, sensory overload, is a largely disregarded problem. The current popularity of techniques like ‘transcendental meditation’ may represent an attempt to counterbalance the absence of silence and solitude which the modern urban environment inflicts upon us.
Removing oneself voluntarily from one’s habitual environment promotes self-understanding and contact with those inner depths of being which elude one in the hurly-burly of day-to-day life. In the ordinary way, our sense of identity depends upon interaction both with the physical world and with other people. My study, lined with books, reflects my interests, confirms my identity as a writer, and reinforces my sense of what kind of person I consider myself to be. My relationships with my family, with colleagues, friends, and less intimate acquaintances, define me as a person who holds certain views and who may be expected to behave in ways which are predictable.
But I may come to feel that such habitually defining factors are also limiting. Suppose that I become dissatisfied with my habitual self, or feel that there are areas of experience or self-understanding which I cannot reach. One way of exploring these is to remove myself from present surroundings and see what emerges. This is not without its dangers. Any form of new organization or integration within the mind has to be preceded by some degree of disorganization. No one can tell, until he has experienced it, whether or not this necessary disruption of former patterns will be succeeded by something better.
The desire for solitude as a means of escape from the pressure of ordinary life and as a way of renewal is vividly illustrated by Admiral Byrd’s account of manning an advanced weather base in the Antarctic during the winter of 1934. He insisted on doing this alone. He admits that his desire for this experience was not primarily the wish to make meteorological observations, although these constituted the ostensible reason for his solitary vigil.
Aside from the meteorological and auroral work, I had no important purposes. There was nothing of that sort. Nothing whatever, except one man’s desire to know that kind of experience to the full, to be by himself for a while and to taste peace and quiet and solitude long enough to find out how good they really are.4
Byrd was not escaping from personal unhappiness. He describes himself as having an extraordinarily happy private life. Nevertheless, the pressures of organizing a variety of expeditions during the previous fourteen years, combined with anxiety about raising money for them and the inevitable publicity which surrounded his achievements, induced what he called ‘a crowding confusion’. He reached a point at which his life appeared to him aimless. He felt that he had no time to read the books he wanted to read; no time to listen to the music he wanted to hear.
I wanted something more than just privacy in the geographical sense. I wanted to sink roots into some replenishing philosophy.5
He also admits that he wanted to test his powers of endurance in an existence more rigorous than anything he had yet experienced. His hopes for finding a new meaning in life were realized. In his diary for 14 April, he records:
Took my daily walk at 4 p.m. today in 89° of frost … I paused to listen to the silence … The day was dying, the night being born – but with great peace. Here were imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos, harmonious and soundless. Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence – a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres, perhaps.
It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance – that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental off-shoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason; that went to the heart of man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos;