William Vallicella praises solitude of the kind enjoyed by introverts. (Introversion is at least one trait that we share.*) Vallicella ends by quoting Albert Einstein:
The introvert comes most fully into his own and most deeply savors his psychological good fortune in old age, as Albert Einstein attests in "Self-Portrait" in Out of My Later Years (Citadel Press, 1956), p. 5: “. . . For the most part I do the thing which my own nature drives me to do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it. Arrows of hate have been shot at me too; but they never hit me, because somehow they belonged to another world, with which I have no connection whatsoever. I live in that solitude [emphasis added by LV] which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Solitude doesn’t just mean being alone. An introvert can be alone, mentally, in a crowd. But being alone, physically (away from the madding crowd), makes it easier to marshal one’s mental resources and thus to cope with the world, and even to improve it.
Anthony Storr captures this state of mind in Solitude: A Return to the Self. Storr, in the book’s final paragraphs, summarizes his themes and conclusions:
This book began with the observation that many highly creative people were predominantly solitary, but that it was nonsense to suppose that, because of this, they were necessarily unhapppy or neurotic. Although man is a social being, who certainly needs interaction with others, there is considerable variation in the depth of the relationships which individuals form with each other. All human beings need interests as well as relationships; all are geared toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal….
The capacity to be alone was adumbrated as a valuable resource, which facilitated learning, thinking, innovation, coming to terms with change, and the maintenance of contact with the inner world of the imagination. We saw that, even in those whose capacity for making intimate relationships has been damaged, the development of creative imagination could exercise a healing function…. Man’s adaptation to the world is largely governed by the development of the imagination and hence of an inner world of the psyche which is necessarily at variance with the external world…. Throughout the book, it was noted that some of the most profound and healing psychological experiences which individuals encounter take place internally, and are only distantly related, if at all, to interaction with other human beings….
The epigraph of this chapter is taken from The Prelude. It is fitting that Wordsworth should also provide its end.
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude.
These are especially trying times for those who thrive on solitude. Aldous Huxley says this in The Perennial Philosophy:
The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions – news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire.
Mr. Huxley would hate the twenty-first century. The noise is beyond deafening. And it’s everywhere: beeping cell phones; loud one-sided conversations into cell phones; talking automobiles; ear-shattering “music” blasting from nearby automobiles, stadium loudspeakers, computers, TVs, and (yes) radios; screeching MoTown (or whatever it’s now called) blasting away in grocery stores (at the request of employees, I suspect); movie soundtracks worthy of the Siege of Stalingrad; and on and on.
Sound has become a substitute for the absorption and processing of information, that is, for thought. The decades-long crescendo in the West’s sound track lends support to the hypothesis that intelligence is on the decline.
And the decline is evident in more than noise. That so much time is wasted on dreck — often whole lifetimes — is a greater tragedy than the inevitable death of any particular artist, writer, or thinker. Equally tragic is the rejection of civilizing traditions, which are also sublime products of the human mind. Thus:
I hate modern art that swaps form for dead sharks; and modern music that exchanges harmony for noise…. I hate religious leaders who think that God is found “in the spaces” and that worship is therapy. I hate our pornographic culture, our tasteless battery foods, and our TV that treats adults like children and children like adults. I hate our obsession with irony, as if a shrug of the shoulders is cleverer than serious inquiry. I hate the death of chivalry, manners and the doffed hats. I hate our promotion of sex over romance – today’s Brief Encounters are very different things. I hate the eradication of guilt and shame, very useful concepts that hold us back from indulgence. [Tim Stanley, “Conservatives: Don’t Despair of Our Corrupt, Decadent Age. Write about It”, The Telegraph, August 2, 2013]
Life needn’t be like that. When all else fails, one can take refuge in one’s own mind, where beauty dwells — if one has cultivated a mind that is immune to the slings and arrows of this outrageous world.
* I am an INTJ, and especially strong in the I, T, and J dimensions. Here are my scores on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) (as of 02/16/17), which is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The descriptive excerpts are from David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates’s Please Understand Me.
EXTRAVERSION 0 – INTROVERSION 10
The person who chooses people as a source of energy probably prefers extraversion, while the person who prefers solitude to recover energy may tend toward introversion.
SENSATION 8 – INTUITION 12
The person who has a natural preference for sensation probably describes himself first as practical, while the person who has a natural preference for intuition probably chooses to describe himself as innovative.
THINKING 20 – FEELING 0
Persons who choose the impersonal basis of choice are called the thinking types by Jung. Persons who choose the personal basis are called the feeling types…. The more extreme feeling types are a bit put off by rule-governed choice, regarding the act of being impersonal as almost inhuman. The more dedicated thinking types, on the other hand, sometimes look upon the emotion-laden decisions and choices as muddle-headed.
JUDGING 19 – PERCEIVING 1
Persons who choose closure over open options are likely to be the judging types. Persons preferring to keep things open and fluid are probably the perceiving types. The J is apt to report a sense of urgency until he has made a pending decision, and then he can be at rest once the decision has been made. The F person, in contrast, is more apt to experience resistance to making a decision, wishing that more data could be accumulated as the basis for the decision. As a result, when a P person makes a decision, he may have a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness, while the J person, in the same situation, may have a feeling of ease and satisfaction.
Js tend to establish deadlines and take them seriously, expecting others to do the same. Ps may tend more to look upon deadlines as mere alarm clocks which buzz at a given time, easily turned off or ignored while one catch an extra forty winks, almost as if the deadline were used more as a signal to start than to complete a project.
It is said that INTJs are type-proud. The reasons for that are evident in the foregoing passages.