Humans are social creatures, and loneliness can be debilitating — yet, many have discovered solace in the solitary life.
Solitude
Posted inFeature
On Solitude (and Isolation and Loneliness [and Brackets])
Sarah Fay reflects on four years spent in solitude (and isolation [and loneliness]), viewing it through the lens of punctuation.
Posted inReading List
This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online
We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
Finding Grace Between Love and Loss
One single mother’s journey to construct a sense of self that’s true to herself, not to other people.
Posted inBooks, Essays & Criticism, Story, Writing
The Writer Alone
A woman out of her mind, locked in an apartment. This, I believed, was the optimal, and probably only, condition under which art could be made.
Posted inReading List
Adventures in Solitude: A Reading List
Being alone, free of distraction, can be both a writer’s dream and a nightmare.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Quitting the Internet, Cold Turkey
The advice offered to me by people when I explain I am going to live by myself in the woods for a week varies from the sensible (“Develop a routine”) to the frankly awful (“Take some weed!”). But it is Michael Harris, the Canadian author who published a book in 2014 called The End of […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How To Be, In Silence
The social world, for all of its fundamental gifts — love, empathy, the lessons arguing provides — obscures the whole self, allowing each of us to mute what is harder to absorb about ourselves in a din of habit and distraction. When an artist breaks through that din, which seems to grow ever louder, she […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Gabriel García Márquez on the Solitude of Writers and Dictators
What Márquez told Peter H. Stone in a 1981 interview with The Paris Review.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Solitude, and the Contrast Between the Outside World and Our Inner Selves
There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that […]