Solitude

Solitude has always been both a blessing and a curse

Two timely books spell out its dangers and perennial allure

In his “politics” Aristotle argued that, thanks to the gift of language, man is destined to be a social and therefore a political animal. Yet the human instinct to socialise has always been balanced by an urge to withdraw into solitude. A few hermits make their lives in isolation, but many ordinary folk believe society is only tolerable if punctuated by frequent spells on their own. “There are many modern thinkers who emphasise the individual’s dependency upon society,” John Cowper Powys, a British writer and advocate of solitude, observed. “It is, on the contrary, only the cultivation of interior solitude, among crowded lives, that makes society endurable.”

Historians are for the most part solitary creatures themselves—the sort of people who, at school, preferred reading to team sports and, as adults, desperately try to avoid committees in order to spend more time in the library. All the same, they generally focus on gregarious activities, whether politicians on manoeuvres or the masses on the march. Bucking that trend, a couple of fascinating books on social isolation have appeared in time for the lockdown. Fay Bound Alberti has tried her hand at a history of loneliness. David Vincent focuses on loneliness’s rather more interesting sibling, solitude. Both concentrate on late modern Britain, Ms Alberti because she argues, somewhat unpersuasively, that loneliness is a recent phenomenon, the product of industrialisation and secularisation; Mr Vincent because he has spent a lifetime studying the country’s modern social history. What Aristotle called the “bird which flies alone” is finally getting his due./.../