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Men in Search of Solitude: FOUR BOOKS
Kerouac | Abbey | Katz | Mahler | Krakauer

Desolation Angels, by Jack Kerouac. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995; New York: Capricorn Books, 1965.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was an unlikely candidate for an experiment in solitude, but he undertook a sixty-three day stint as a fire look-out on Desolation Peak, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. His life had been a zigzag from aloneness to social frenzy for years, and at the time of the experiment, the famous books that were to confirm his place in American literature epitomizing the Beat Generation of the 1950's still remained unpublished. The winding trail of drugs, alcohol, sex, homelessness, vagabonding, in-group, and incessant reading and writing was beginning to unravel into despair. In 1954, Kerouac took up the study of Buddhism as a possible solace. But as his friend Joyce Johnson has perceptively written:

Although Kerouac would achieve a deep intellectual understanding of Buddhism and would learn to practice meditation, his pursuit of peace had a frantic quality that was self-defeating. Through Buddhism, he could rationalize the void he had discovered within himself, but he could never really accept it.

On the advice of Gary Snyder, the poet-scholar-translator-roughneck who had worked as a fire look-out himself, Kerouac applied and was accepted to work during the summer of 1956. He spent sixty-three days on Desolation Peak with, as he put it, "no characters, alone, isolated." The record of this period is the first part of his novel Desolation Angels, entitled Desolation in Solitude, plus a little of the second part. Since all of Kerouac's fiction is literal autobiography, these passages can be taken as a reliable reflection of his thought at the time.

There are evocative passages in Desolation in Solitude, but everything is run through his jocular, cynical, compulsive, subjective persona. Here is a typical passage:

The Void is the crystal ball itself and all my woes the Lankavatara Scripture hairnet of fools, "Look sirs, a marvelous sad hairnet" -- Hold together, Jack, past through everything, and everything is one dream, one appearance, one flash, one sad eye, one crystal lucid mystery, one word -- Hold still man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and simply be--be--be the infinite fertilities of the one mind of infinity, making no comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting stars of thoughts, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what is, it is only what it always is -- Hope is a word like a snow drift -- This is the Great Knowing, this is the Awakening, this is Voidness -- So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry ...

Most of his days Kerouac passed in conjuring memories, fantasizing, counting the days until he could return to San Francisco, return to normalcy, which was the endless rounds of drinking, eating, talking, staring at life as a spectacle.

In finer moments, Kerouac talks about the Peak's snow, trails, a caterpillar, picking wild blueberries, and confesses to murdering a mouse. He talks about the mind, the dusk, radio chatter from other look-outs, a storm, and occasional references to the famous Chinese mountain hermit, icon of the Beat circle, Han-shan:

I called Han Shan in the fog--there was no answer--
The sound of silence
 -- is all the instruction you'll get.

Kerouac was busy writing haikus in this period, and a number first appear in Desolation Angels.

Though we cannot not dispel his cleverness and zest for life, the pathos of Kerouac is transparent. The experiment in solitude was grist for a writer's mill, involuntary but pragmatically useful, like everything else Kerouac touched. But the sadness is palpable.

Desolation Adventure finds me finding at the bottom of myself abysmal nothingness worse than that no illusion even -- my mind's in rags.

Returning to San Francisco, he offers this conclusion:

The vision of the freedom of eternity which I saw and which all wilderness hermitage saints have seen, is of little use in cities and warring societies such as we have.

The following year (1957) Kerouac finally published On the Road and Dharma Bums the year after that -- and so the legendary chronicler of the Beat Generation was established in history. But though he published regularly after that, Kerouac's self-destruction spun unchecked and in growing solitariness until his death in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968; Ballantine Books, 1973.

Edward Abbey's chronicle of a year's stint as park ranger in Arches National Park near Moab, Utah, as caretaker of what Abbey calls a "33,000-acre garden," is a brilliant tour-de-force revealing every nuance of its author's strong personality and of the magnificent desert environment he encountered.

Abbey has an encyclopedic knowledge of plants, rocks, animal life, meteorological lore. His unabashed love of wilderness and its preservation rivals that of his heroes Muir, Thoreau, Audubon, Catlin the painter, and John Wesley Powell, the one-armed explorer-adventurer. Every page is filled by Abbey's opinionated, garrulous, sardonic, sensitive voice, yet it is isolation, solitude, and silence that awe him.

I am here [in the wilderness] not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.

The year (minus winter) includes rich first-hand accounts of desert flora, snakes, water, rocks, heat, rivers, a feral horse. Abbey spends the hours alone, occasionally finding a taciturn buddy for climbing or river-rafting, but pursuing a lot of daredevil adventuring alone. He offers splendid polemics against anything that threatens nature and wilderness.

There is no desert spirituality or eremitic journal-keeping here. Abbey is too ornery, too rough-and-tumble a character for that. For all his bravado and exploits, though, Abbey keeps his sentiments close.

Desert Solitaire, now a virtual classic, is a unique documentation of one man's embrace of  solitude, wilderness, and what Abbey calls the "delirious exhilaration of independence."

Running to the Mountain: A Journey of Faith and Change, by Jon Katz. New York: Villard, 1999.

Jon Katz, a self-described hack television producer and mystery novelist, offers this book as a testimony to an episode of searching for solitude, using Thomas Merton as his model.

The book fails (painfully) because Katz clearly has no interest in solitude or, really, in Merton. They are props to his annual book-for-pay. He is turning fifty, in mid-life crisis, as he freely admits. Despite wife, daughter, comfortable suburban home and a mountain of debts -- but not the mountain of the title -- he buys a cabin in upstate New York for his experiment in solitude. A few months off to find himself.

But Katz's "solitude" consists of two dogs, a supply of Scotch, CD player, satellite dish and television, cell phone, and books by Merton and H. L. Mencken. He chatters incessantly with townsfolk, buddies, realtor, repairmen, people at the diner, the donut shop, the hardware store, wife, and even the ghost of Merton, who, however, does not appear until the last third of the book. He throws a few punches at Merton's familiar foibles, gloats a bit, slaps Merton's shoulder, and basically quits the experiment in a mix of triumph and homesickness.

Katz lacks what many people lack when the subject of solitude is brought up: humility, simplicity, and the will to disengage. But the lack of will to follow through with his inkling of solitude is worsened by mocking the effort with a contrived tour de force and a book to boot. Katz's family has enormous indulgence but readers will probably have very little.

Stillness: Daily Gifts of Solitude, by Richard Mahler. Boston: Redwheel, 2003.

The publisher lists this book as "Inspiration/Self-Help" and that description better fits than philosophy or spirituality, despite the expected overlap. Mahler, a writer and media producer by profession, was winter caretaker on a New Mexico ranch, without electricity, with a wood stove and emergency radio. A narrative of this experience would be welcome, and his book is scattered with journal entries, but there are virtually no details nor forthcoming reflections as systematic as Jane Dobisz tells from her winter Zen retreat or the winter solitude of May Sarton. The entries are dropped here and there with no chronology or apparent momentum.

In fact, the content is primarily that of most simplicity and personal time management books, with some historical and anecdotal material added. There are a lot of bulleted lists, such as "Benefits of Silence and Solitude" or "Perceived Advantages and Disadvantages of a Simpler Life," plus quotations, surveys, article-findings like "Symptoms of a Hurry-up World." In the style of a glossy magazine, there are lots of how-to text boxes with recommendations of intended good things to pursue, such as "Exploring the Sensual Pleasures of Silence and Solitude," "Take a Day Off," "Finding Your Natural Place," and "Times and Places to Nurture Silence and Solitude."

Mahler skirts the fence between simplicity and outright solitude, coming down clearly on the side of simplicity as solitude or, maybe, solitude as simplicity, or .... The book lacks a spiritual or even psychological dimension, and without a narrative of his winter of solitude, we have no way to connect his how-to advice with anything other than the popular simplicity books that glut store and library shelves, full of recommended "epicurean" practices to introduce into your daily life.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer; New York: Villard, 1996; Anchor Books, 1997.