Many articles and podcasts have seized upon the topic of loneliness, aloneness, and solitude since the 2023 Cambridge University Press publication of The Power of Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone, by psychologists and researchers Netta Weinstein, Thuy-vy T. Nguyen, and science writer Heather Hansen.
But the flurry of media remains largely diluted popularization and redundancy. Perhaps the “science” of psychology is of less interest than popularization filled with advice and upbeat reassurances about loneliness, aloneness, and solitude.
At the root of the topic of solitude, aloneness, and loneliness must be appreciation for the terms and how they are expressed, of realization of how culturally dependent the terms are. Solitude has wide cultural and historical contexts, from religious, spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic contexts. Translating the modern social context into an appreciation of solitude requires a look at the historical hermits and how solitude emerged from eremitism and morphed into modern versions.
Loneliness is the human sensitivity to the nature of the universe, not the source of why an individual may be alone. R. H. Blyth (1898-1964) cites a haiku of Japanese poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902):
Loneliness;
After the fireworks,
A falling star.
Notes Blyth: “The ‘lonelines’ that Shiki speaks of here is a feeling, a weltschmerz, a cosmic emotion that is at the back of most great poetry and much great literature, but unnamed in the English language. This ‘loneliness’ denotes an unnameable state of mind that has only a distant and biological connection with feeling lonesome and wanting someone to talk to. The falling star that glides so silently across the autumn sky, without meaning, without object, gives us the feeling of nature as opposed to that of man. Instead of the fireworks with their many-coloured lights, we have a single faintly curved, faintly bluish line of light. It is
The night in its silence,
The stars in their calm.
The real meaning of ‘calmness’ here and that of sabi-shisa is the same.”
The consciousness of impermanence in Japanese thought (mujo) gives us the perspective for appreciating sabi or solitude as larger than any one thing or person. In the modern perspective, loneliness may be but an immature look at solitude. Blyth suggests that loneliness, experienced in the larger and more universal context, as in Shiki, is the beginning of enlightment, of understanding.