Solitude
Ulanov, Ann Belford
WHERE THE IMAGINATION LIVES SOUTUDE A Return to the Self Anthony Storr Free Press, $17.95, 216 pp. Ann Belford Ulanov In the mid-nineteenth century, Baudelaire, out of his solitude, asked a...
...Newton successfully battled a psychotic interval through the resources and refuge of work, whose high degree of abstraction required long periods of solitary, intense thought...
...Storr offers a corrective to the object-relations school of depth psychology where so much emphasis is placed on the importance of our relationships with other people for our mental health...
...Indeed, even for the average person, let alone the greatly gifted one, solitude is the natural habitat for the creative imagination...
...Depression, grief, and damage to a sense of trust can be healed in part by solitude...
...This is a good book with wide-ranging information about kinds of solitude and the persons who pursued it...
...My only regret is that Dr...
...Moreover, in the later years of our lives, the "third period" to be exact, the interest in meaning, wholeness, pattern, and purpose assumes dominance...
...Kipling, Saki, and Wodehouse found not only refuge but reparation from uncaring parents in the solitary constructions of stories that eventually offered many hours of equally solitary pleasure to their readers...
...There we find examples, with richly instructive detail, of how pursuit of our own thought and feeling in solitude lead far outside a narrow construction of self to the very heart of Being, possibly with world-changing results...
...Rightly so, Storr agrees, but not exclusively so...
...For solitude brings many gifts and we need it for repair...
...That would not have been possible, Storr asserts, if Newton had been subject to the ordinary demands of spouse and family...
...Storr draws usefully on Jung as a depth psychologist who taught his patients how to listen to the inner voice of the psyche that moves the lost soul to rediscover its proper path and to contribute to the world...
...Out of such hearing comes the capacity to talk about what matters...
...Ann Belford Ulanov In the mid-nineteenth century, Baudelaire, out of his solitude, asked a question thaf we very much need to answer now that our century is drawing to a close...
...We can use what gifts we have to come to terms with and make sense of suffering...
...He is making the case instead that "human beings are directed by nature toward the impersonal as well as toward the personal, and that this feature of the human condition is a valuable and important part of our adaptation...
...Creative acts can help us overcome a feeling of helplessness...
...As with Beethoven in the later quartets, there is less interest in pleasing or reaching the listener than with the contemplation of one's own experience of reality, thinking out loud as it were, meditating on being and letting others listen in...
...Storr is not arguing that creative work is an alternative to human relationships...
...Kant and Wittgenstein stand out for profoundly original thought that required of them many hours alone for concentrated reflection...
...In this sense, the attitude required not just of the patient but of all of us who return in any significant way to solitude is a religious one- listening to otherness as it addresses us...
...Not lonely, but alone, thinking and feeling about how the parts of ourselves go together, how our work makes intrinsic patterns of reality evident, and how the cosmos is ordered to make a whole...
...Storr thus calls us back to a simple truth we have surely always known- that solitude contributes to contentment, that when we are alone we need not be unhappy...
...Storr did not make greater use of the literature and lives of the religious mystics...
...In this readable text, Storr gives interesting vignettes of the lives of people who are both creative and solitary...
...Or, for some Beethoven admirers, we might go further and say that in the late quartets we are hearing Being's experience of Being...
...He asked why people did not want to talk about what really mattered...
...Anthony Storr in his examination of solitude helps us reflect on the connection between certain levels of creative work and the capacity to be alone...
Vol. 116 • February 1989 • No. 4
