Monday, February 9, 2009

Cultivating Solitude

You need a lot of discipline to cultivate solitude. To plant the seeds of it, you need not to watch TV, you need not to blog or send out too many texts or check your facebook account or update it. 
You need to find some time where you are alone and you are not reaching out to anybody or anything. You can be an observer and not really report it to anybody. I kind of did it on Friday night and most of Saturday and the results were interesting. I find it made me calmer, it balanced my approach to things and has now rendered me annoyingly self congratulatory.
I was inspired by an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education by William Deresiewicz, who says that the contemporary self is most scared of anonymity. His theory is very sound--he says our need to be connected is also the need to be visible.  So when we post our photographs on facebook or when I write on this blog, it validates me. In his words:
"This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility"
I recommend reading the article in its entirety but what was particularly valuable to me was this concluding paragraph:
"A constant stream of mediated contact, virtual, notional, or simulated, keeps us wired in to the electronic hive — though contact, or at least two-way contact, seems increasingly beside the point. The goal now, it seems, is simply to become known, to turn oneself into a sort of miniature celebrity. How many friends do I have on Facebook? How many people are reading my blog? How many Google hits does my name generate? Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone."

4 comments:

shenanigans said...

I hear you. And I agree with the essence of the post. I only wish I had the will power and the self control to switch off the phone, turn off the tv and hang up those dancing shoes. If only for a weekend.

Reportergirl said...

yes, its kind of hard to stop once you're in that loop, come to think of it

bint battuta said...

Beautiful. Now moving away from my screen for a while :)

Reportergirl said...

Well, I'm very thankful for all the time you spend blogging Ms Battuta because I love reading what you have to say!