Solitude is not foreign to anyone. It is a universal reality that permeates all our experiences. But why write a book about it? One answer: God. God is the One we seek in solitude. Solitude, which is a listening to God, a being with God, an attentiveness to God’s word and wisdom, and a being-in-love with God, is worth the journey into it. Persons who enter into solitude and taste its fruits will no longer see as they saw before. Solitude offers another way of seeing. When we are open to discover and to receive, the mystery of solitude purifies the sight, the seeing, the beholding of each person. When solitude brings us to God, God brings us into new vision. This book is directed to all who seek God and who long to “see” God and to know God’s ways more truly. This book is for those who are so eager to be transformed in Christ that they are willing to wade into the waters of solitude. This book invites you to an exploration that begins with the desires to pray: to pray because the hunger for God pursues you; to pray because you believe the value of prayer. Solitude is a milieu of prayer: it beckons us to seek God. Prayer will lead you into the solitude God wants for you. Prayer opens the door to a solitude which will open you to God. Once you read this book, solitude will not be a solitude of emptiness; love will be near.

Seeking in Solitude examines select forms of contemporary Roman Catholic eremitic life and practice in the United States. Given the sustained presence of, and increased interest in, the eremitic life and practice, this book responds to the question of the place of the hermit in American Catholicism in a way that neither mystifies nor mythologizes it, but rather attempts to understand it.

Winner of the 2010 Sigourney Award! Quinodoz brings together views of eminent analysts to present a comprehensive approach to the experience of loneliness, anxiety about which commonly leads people to analysis and which stems from unresolved anxiety about separation.

Exploring how notions of solitude in Pali literature are encompassed in various literary forms, such as stock formulae, poetry, narrative, and imagery, this book includes close analysis of some of the most famous Buddhist verses about solitary practice. Indaka Nishan Weerasekera considers how solitude is valued as one significant aspect of the Buddhist path, including how the imagery of landscape, especially the forest, serves to both inspire solitary practice as well as functions as a metaphor for meditation. The author employs a cross-section of primary sources to explore the practical and psychological aspects of solitude in relation to Buddhist meditation, as well as relational/attitudinal concepts such as renunciation or desirelessness, independence, and self-reliance. This 'lonely' aspect of the Buddhist path sits alongside the 'communal' aspect of the Buddhist teachings. Together, they serve to maintain monastic harmony, while the 'social' aspect preserves monastic relations with wider society.

Recent literary criticism, along with academic culture at large, has stressed collaboration as essential to textual creation and sociability as a literary and academic virtue. Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an alternative understanding of writing with a complementary mode of reading: literary engagement, it suggests, is the meeting of strangers, each in a state of isolation. The Renaissance authors discussed in this study did not necessarily work alone or without collaborators, but they were uncertain who would read their writings and whether those readers would understand them. These concerns are represented in their work through tropes, images, and characterizations of isolation. The figure of the isolated, misunderstood, or misjudged poet is a preoccupation that relies on imagining the lives of wandering and complaining youths, eloquent melancholics, exemplary hermits, homeless orphans, and retiring stoics; such figures acknowledge the isolation in literary experience. As a response to this isolation of literary connection, Solitude and Speechlessness proposes an interpretive mode it defines as strange reading: a reading that merges comprehension with indeterminacy and the imaginative work of interpretation with the recognition of historical difference.

The poet and author’s “beautiful . . . wise and warm” journal of time spent in her New Hampshire home alone with her garden, her books, the seasons, and herself (Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer). “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” —May Sarton May Sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life—not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude—both an exhilarating and terrifying state. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again,” which sometimes plunges her into depression. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain. Journal of a Solitude is a moving and profound meditation on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Both uplifting and cathartic, it sweeps us along on Sarton’s pilgrimage inward. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

The interplay between solitude and society was a particularly persistent theme in nineteenth-century American literature, though writers approached this theme in different ways. Poe explored the metaphysical significance of isolation and held solitude in high esteem; Hawthorne viewed the theme in moral terms and examined the obligation of each individual to the larger community; and Emerson maintained that the contradictory states of self-reliance and solidarity are fundamental to human happiness. Herman Melville emerged with an ontological response to this issue. Questioning the nature of being, he argued that humans are essentially isolated creatures. While he grants that we are free to choose how we conduct our lives, whether in solitude or in society, we cannot escape the essential condition of our alienation. Thus in Moby-Dick, he coins the term Isolato to signify the inherent separateness of all individuals. Writing some fifty years later, Edith Wharton reached the same conclusion. This book argues that Wharton's views on solitude and society were strongly parallel to those of Melville. Scholars have generally held that Wharton was primarily influenced by the great English, French, and Russian writers of the nineteenth century; and that with the exception of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry James, she neglected the influence of American literature almost entirely. This study demonstrates that Wharton read a significant portion of Melville's writings, that she reflected on the nature and achievement of his works, and that her consideration of his importance emerged during very significant moments in her life, when she was forced to grapple with her own place as an individual in relation to a larger community. Though Melville and Wharton initially seem disparate, this book shows that they had much in common. By studying the two authors side by side, this volume reveals that they shared a similar way of seeing the world, particularly with respect to their considerations of solitude and society. Through their solitary characters, Melville and Wharton question the relationship of self and society and thus engage a universal problem of special interest to the nineteenth century.

A notable discovery of a truly original voice Several stories inhabit Roger Lewinter’s first small book to appear in English, Story of Love in Solitude. Each story takes the form of a loop: a spider who won’t stop returning; camellias that flourish and then die; dying parents whose presence is always yet felt; turning again and again to work on Rilke translations; a younger man whom the narrator sees each week at the Geneva street markets. All the tales touch on the possibility, the open possibility of love—a loop without end. Lewinter’s short fictional works are at once prose poems and a form of dreaming; they are akin to the great French tradition of things sparking emotions and emotions sparking things—part Sarraute, part Robbe-Grillet, part Perec. Plot is not really the point of his meditative works. Lewinter concerns himself more with perception, apperception, and sudden inflections of grace: loss and beauty meet in an explosion of joy, which becomes, “in its brilliance, a means of transmittal.”