Women in Search of Solitude: EIGHT BOOKS
Sarton |
Grumbach |
Shulman |
Mills |
Scot |
Dillard |
Karper |
Dobisz
Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton. New York: Norton, 1973.
May Sarton is an important figure among American women writers and feminists, and her Journal of a Solitude is considered a turning point not only in her career but in terms of its influence on the structure and content of similar journals, most obvious being Grumbach and Shulman reviewed below. But the notion of solitude in Sarton is a deliberate polemical one: the woman as solitary and marginalized in society and culture. The Journal reflects a year in Sarton's late fifties, living alone in Nelson, New Hampshire, where she moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts after her parent's death. Nelson is solitary as in the sense of small town, but also socially and culturally isolated. But that is how Sarton identifies herself at this stage in her career and life.
I am bored with my life here at present. There is not enough nourishment in it. There are times when the lack of any good conversation, theatre, concerts, art museums around here -- cultured life -- creates a vacuum of boredom.
However, we (and she) know that the isolation Sarton experiences is built into her life as a writer, feminist, lesbian, single child, alone, a person disposed to deep depression and outbursts of anger ("cosmic mood-swing"). "Solitude here is my life. I have chosen it and had better go on making as great riches as possible out of despair," she writes. She is passionately devoted to gardening, flower-arrangements, productivity. Her solitude nevertheless takes her around the country for presentations and poetry readings, and she entertains visitors regularly, who, however, make her feel "overcharged," "scattered." Hence, while the Journal of a Solitude is best viewed as an autobiographical literary work, we can see glimpses of the failed notion of solitude, of the sad and oppressive view of solitude that most people imagine.
Fifty Days of Solitude, by Doris Grumbach. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
Doris Grumbach was an established writer and 75 years old when she had the opportunity one Maine winter to find herself alone for fifty days. Solitude is never complete: she visited the grocer and post office, attended church services in her little town of Sargentsville, but she elected to exchange a minimum of words and deliberately did not interrelated with anyone.
Rather than boring minutiae, however, her record of these days reveals a sharp mind attentive to detail and introspection. Grumbach has the skill and command of literature to summon up anecdotes and telling quotations running from Jessamyn West to Paul Valery to Henri Nouwen to illustrate her thoughts. This informed, intellectual but humane voice is the strength of the book and makes the whole experiment in solitude worthwhile. Look for no particular psychology or revealing daily journal, just a literate and sensitive record of one person's thoughts at large.
Drinking the Rain, by Alix Kates Shulman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995.
Subtitled "A Memoir" on the dust jacket cover, this book is a wide-ranging narrative of a couple of years in the mid-1980's in the life of a well-known writer and Manhattanite spending summers in an isolated Maine waterfront cabin. The three sections, The Island, The Mainland, and The World, hover around the paradox of a passage from James Baldwin which the author quotes twice:
One would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas, which seem to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are... in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. ... The second idea, of equal power, that one must never in one's own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one's strength.
This memoir of solitude on a Maine seacoast does not resolve the paradox, more acute given the author's class and hobnobbery among people of relative substance. Section One shines with hope. Her discovery of self-sufficiency in food (foraging daily for wild greens and fruits, daily clams and mussels), simple quarters, basic furnishings, all off the grid, no running water, etc. are ably described and convey an infectious sense of excitement.
But Section 2, with the Mainland as metaphor for her bourgeois lifestyle, plunges us back into the activist world of posturing and false dilemmas, the noise of urbanity and the chatter of chic angst. (Particularly grating is an old friend met at a Thanksgiving feast, who professes Buddhism as "enjoy what you've got" and then raves about the duck pate.) This whole section is exhausting in relating all the contrived issues the author has collected in her life to date, at the age of "five-oh."
The final section is called The World because it does not resolve the original paradox. It is a little more redemptive but by now the reader may be worn out and a little skeptical, especially with the moose roast at the cabin. It's hard to picture a dichotomous Thoreau, though he too did not resolve his own paradox, but unfortunately our author does not even try very hard by the end. The letdown after Section 1 is never remedied; Baldwin's challenge remains.
Epicurean Simplicity, by Stephanie Mills. Washington DC: Island Press, 2002.
Stephanie Mills is an established environmental writer and lecturer with books, articles, and conference appearances to her credit. In this book, her insights on nature, environmental degradation, and the elements of living simply are clear, articulate, and compelling. But, as Mills tells the reviewer, the book is not explicitly about solitude. It, nevertheless, may serve as a diary of happenstance and a guidebook to the viable solitary.
Epicurean Simplicity shows that a life of solitude is not necessarily deprived of people, emotion, or the sensuous (that is, sense-related) pleasures of nature, hence the notion of benign Epicureanism underlying a simple life observed and savored. Mills offers a very autobiographical narrative of life on 35 wooded acres in northern Michigan -- part diary, part writer's journal, part philosophical musing, plus some nostalgia and speculation. She is sensitive to seasons and circumstances. The sympathetic reader instantly shares the natural wonder and pathos Mills conjures, describing trees, insects, gardens, snow, animal friends. These are the sources that fill our senses with delight and a little pathos, confirming the naturalistic philosophy of Epicurus and Lucretius, who bid us set aside artificial speculations and recognize the exquisite beauty and simple wonders of life and nature before us.
Mills calls herself a Luddite shunning technology, hunkering in her cabin with propane and firewood, attending to her own chores, pursuing the small wonders of natural life at her window or woodlands, a simple life of writing and reflecting. Since publication Mills reluctantly uses a computer and the Internet, in part the result of pressure from editors.
Epicurean Simplicity is not laden with science or scholarship. The tone is conversational, the prose lyrical, the thoughts unflinching. The book is a congenial reflection on the art of living in solitude and simplicity.
The Stations of Still Creek, by Barbara J. Scot. San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1999.
There is more in this book about marriage and mountain climbing than about solitude, though Scot's memoir features a central image of solitude in self and nature. She and her husband own a cabin on the outskirts of Mt. Hood National Forest in Oregon, where she retreats alone after a disturbing experience. Her husband Jim, an avid mountain climber, is reported missing in an accident in Nepal, and though soon confirmed to be alright and later back home in one piece, Scot has suffered an emotional jolt that compels her to revisit her life's priorities. Jim is the other major character in her tale, whom she portrays with brutally frankness as aloof and business-like. His safe return from Nepal has only triggered Scot's quest for self-discovery. Jim is rehabilitated at the end of the story during a mountain climb they both undertake -- together, for a change.
The stations theme is, of course, reminiscent of the Stations of the Cross, but here they are emotionally positive, natural settings Scot discovers in the forest around the cabin, dubbed Old Growth Sculpture, Burned-out Cedar Snag, Maidenhair Fern Point, Green Cathedral, among others. But Scot never delves into a philosophy of life and solitude. Rather, at this stage of her life (age fifty-four), the experience of the stations touch a feminine chord that sets the author on a path of reflection and reassessment. She is not an idle Thoreau, but is wrestling with mixed feelings about marriage, nurturing, creativity, and death. Her chronicle touches the female pulse of life, the yin of nature. The book shows how solitude can become a very subjective pursuit, such that an outsider can only watch from afar and hope for the best.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard. New York: Harper, 1974.
Women writers in search of solitude or happening upon it in reflection interweave a more private persona into their narrative that is usually absent in the bravado or aloofness of men's writings. But Dillard comes close to mingling the two genres. She lives alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and these magazine articles cobbled into an ostensible pilgrimage in the surroundings of a creek near her home breathe an unsettled and unsettling ambiguity.
"I am no scientist," Dillard tells us. "I am a wanderer with a background in theology and a penchant for quirky facts." She considers her house in a homely vein: "An anchorite's hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds are simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the rock-bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current as an anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down." She gets the etymology right, but it is entomology that really moves Dillard, with an air of Southern Gothic. Beware the barnacle image! Dillard's view of nature is sheer Darwinian caricature accelerated to the bizarre and macabre. She describes giant water bugs disabling frogs, biting insects bringing down small mammals, the shrewd mechanisms of parasites, muskrat hunting, leeches, ducks frozen on wintry lake surfaces, horrors of locusts. "For most creatures, being parasitized is a way of life -- if you call that living."
Nor is the plant world exempt from Dillard's dark eye: "I see scratched and peeled stems, leaves that are half-eaten, rusted, blighted, blistered, snipped, smutted, pitted, puffed, sawed, bored, and rucked.
Is there a philosophy of life here, let alone one of solitude, harmony, or pilgrimage? Concludes Dillard: "Is this what it's like? I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass? Must everything whole be subdued? Here was a new light on the intricate texture of things after the fall: the way we the living are nibbled and nibbling -- not held aloft on a cloud in the air but bumbling pitted and scarred and broken through a frayed and beautiful land." Dillard's frayed soul, left in a macabre solitude, projects itself as a pilgrim in a strange and hostile land.
This is a narrative of several years of life in a West Virginia backwoods, written by a Poor Clare nun experimenting with a new lifestyle. Sister Karen entered her order in 1959 at the age of 17. She was in her twenties when the ramifications of the Second Vatican Council struck her order, as well as the entire Catholic Church. It is not clear if she used the hermit status as a polite way of quitting the order, but it took thirty years to get to the status that was denied a lifetime to Thomas Merton.
For the author of a biography of St. Clare, this
book lacks a spiritual dimension and the deeper insight that solitude is
supposed to offer to a spiritually-minded person. Much is promised by the
title, which the author derives from a line of Meister Eckhart: "There where
clinging to things ends, there God begins to be." Further, one hesitates to
describe these years as those of a hermit, for it seems busy with human
interrelations: two other nuns living nearby, a garrulous old neighbor, the
grocery, the post office, repairmen, church, even a monthly return to the
Ohio convent to teach. We all have neighbors who live solitary lives, keep
to themselves, pursue a silent routine of work and chores -- but they are
not hermits.
The author acknowledges the lack of personal feelings in her narrative when
several potential publishers critique her manuscript, but the absence of
insights of famous Christian hermits or mystics is telling. One reviewer,
also a nun, unsparingly criticized the author's affection for her cat as a displaced
love of Christ, condemning the book to a shallow egoism.
The author is now Karen Fredette, married and editor of a newsletter for
hermits, Raven's Bread. One wonders how the transition from
near-hermit and nun to full-time "householder" would work as a sequel.
The charisma of this little book is the author's amiable assembly of events in her 100-day solitude within the themes of insightful koans and stories of Zen masers. The book is not a rote diary's succession of random thoughts or events but a reflection on a succession of realizations about self and reality, an anecdotal conversation with a person who has acquired a certain wisdom even as we watch.
The details of what the deserted cabin was like, the kind and quantity of food, the sensations of winter and abiding solitude -- plus the routine of sitting, walking, bowing (a vigorous exercise), wood-chopping, all following the instructions of a Korean Zen master, are presented with modest and grace. There is nothing here to frustrate a non-Zen reader or anyone inexperienced with solitude. Dobisz was a novice herself, and so the experiment in solitude as enlightenment is clearly and warmly communicated. She writes:
By making my focus smaller and smaller, everything is getting bigger and bigger. ... There's a vast space around things in which anything is possible. A sense of rapture permeates even the smallest activities of the day. ... The true way is always right in front of you.
Twenty-five years later, Dobisz is now Zen master Bon Yeon leading retreats in the Boston area. URL: http://www.thewisdomofsolitude.com.
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