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./.../
“Not for three months will the horse chestnut trees on Paris' Champs-Elysees begin to turn yellow. Yet last week on the brief and severe Rue de la Paix autumn had already come. And on hand for its coming was an excited little army of U. S. dress buyers who crowded through closely-guarded doorways into the salons of the great Parisian couturiers. Inside the warm air was heavy with perfume and the smell of new silk. Buyers who usually paid $100 to get in (refunded on the first order) cocked their heads and adjusted their glasses as the sleek mannequins rustled to ward them in long-skirted evening gowns, sport dresses with Brazil nuts for buttons, coats made of steamer rugs, woolen dresses with oilcloth grapes. Soon the buyers would stream out of the city with notes and gossip on the fashions Paris was about to set the world for the winter of 1934-35.” (Aug. 13, 1934)
Whatever happened to the hat? Wherefore the fedora? Where have they stashed the Stetsons? Who has banished…
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