The Authorial Rabbit and friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh discussed solitude the other day. Titmarsh remembered the lines in Wordsworth’s Prelude: “And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much/The self-sufficing power of Solitude.”
In the West, being alone or isolated, away from electricity and other modern urban conveniences, not to mention the radio, TV, the Internet and cellphones, was the norm up until the 19th century and not uncommon until the middle of the 20th, especially in the wilds that Wordsworth so loved as a boy as well as remoter acres in North and South America.
During the coronavirus crisis we are being asked to isolate again: stay home if having traveled or if slightly ill, stay away from big events, crowds, concerts, dances, take care even in smaller places — mouths covered, hands washed, surfaces not touched, including hands and faces in greeting and those unconscious touches of self-consolation.
Think of those immense past-century poems and novels designed for long days and nights of quiet reading. We now have the radio, TV, DVDS, the Internet. Still we will be challenged. Extroverts especially. One monkey is no monkey. Introverts may adjust better.
It is hard to break habitual rhythms, awaken from long sleepy marches through life. But immensely valuable. The author Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his recent Globe and Mail article on the virus, while laying out a frightening consequence of our new global interconnectedness along communications and financial systems, also postulates such a virus’ potential benefit:
Today’s emerging pandemic could help catalyze an urgently needed tipping event in humanity’s collective moral values, priorities and sense of self and community. It could remind us of our common fate on a small, crowded planet with dwindling resources and fraying natural systems.
Other commentators, having studied the history of past plagues, warn of darker behaviours in the struggle to survive.
Even in the face of the fear of getting sick, of losing support systems, of losing income, to have time for solitude — and for being with our loved ones — may enrich us.
J. B. Thompson 