Solitude

I am driving through the southern mountains of Montenegro one August night in 2005 to get to the region's annual Albanian folk festival being held in a remote village called Vitoja. When you're driving through town, a friend told me when I asked for directions earlier, you'll see the church on the right. The shops are closed, the church lights are off, and no one is on the street. Stay to the left at the fork and keep going until you see lights, he said. Fifteen minutes later, as I find myself in a large valley surrounded by mountains, I call him again, making sure I hadn't botched these simple directions. Keep going, he told me, you'll pass through Mali Hotit, the Hoti Mountains, and the road will tighten.

Mali Hotit, I repeat in my mind, the mountains that were bloodied by hundreds of years of battles with the Turks and Slavs. Over these mountains rode Ded Gjo Luli, the hero I have heard about in songs since I was born, leading the tribes of Malsia to battle and heroic death against the Ottoman Sultan and Montenegrin Krajli. Across these mountains rang out gunshots, booming canons and the shrill cries of dying soldiers. These are the mountains that echoed back the beating of drums and the voices of sentries sending news from peak to peak. Tonight they are silent. And as I pull over onto the side of the road to remember this moment of solitude, I hear only the grinding of the tires as I slow down and a few pebbles bounce against the belly of the 1993 Opel I rented for my two week vacation in the place of my father’s birth.

*

The word solitude comes from the Latin solus, an adjective meaning alone or only, which formed the noun solitudo, which came to mean want. Loneliness is a word often associated with solitude, and although they share a common root, their meanings have come to differ considerably in the minds of most English speakers. While solitude connotes peace, calm and tranquility, the word loneliness has come to mean isolation, emptiness, and boredom. Solitude and loneliness have often been the focus of great works of literature and art. While loneliness is often a sign of depression, a frightening chance to look inward at oneself when one is not inspired, but scared, solitude affords the sentient man or woman the opportunity to think on his or her own terms. It is a moment or two of being alone, when one may choose to look out of the fourth floor window of a walk-up in Boston and watch people walk by, even though there is a stack of bills on the nightstand.

The Belgian born poet May Sarton once remarked, “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.” Perhaps this is true because loneliness is not usually a choice that a person makes. I am lonely when I am bored, when all I have the energy to do is turn on the television and stare. I cannot sleep when I am lonely, even when there is nothing else to do. I cannot write or get work done when I am lonely, perhaps because I can find no peace. Being struck with a bout of loneliness is like being forced to look at a person who you pass on the street in winter and feel sorry for because they are cold and that person is you.

But solitude in today’s world (and it probably has been so for one of Alexander’s troops or Elizabeth’s maids) is a clean, strong breeze blowing through a musty apartment. Papers are scattered and curtains fly, but there is a sense in that apartment of freshness—there is a new beginning there. Solitude affords the time to choose surroundings, choose thoughts, impulses, insights, choose what will help a person feel close to himself, comfortable with himself, feel the pulse of his or her life and feel the history of that life and its future. Whether it is found in a park with ambient little league noise, on a rocking subway, or while pulled over on a country road in Southeastern Europe, solitude is the wall across a gorge that we can yell at, waiting patiently for what the callback has to say. And for anyone who has ever listened for an echo, we know the words that bounce back are the same, but they are still unfamiliar—they are changed, new.

Though the contents of the mind are often muddy, even in moments of solitude, the opportunity to heighten one’s senses can also provide a stillness that enables a way of looking at the world through snapshots. T.S. Eliot spoke in his Four Quartets of the “still point,” the “occupation of the saint,” the gift of a flash of silence in which there is understanding. Early in his career, still a young writer walking the crowded streets of Boston, Eliot wrote about a spiritual experience that struck him during a moment of clarity. Eliot called this moment “the ultimate hour / When life is justified,” and says that the peace was so true it was terrifying. In his solitude, Eliot was able to grab hold of himself through “the garrulous waves of life.” “There is nothing else beside,” he says.

*

I have been sitting in my car for a quarter hour looking out at the mountains and breathing the cold air. Summer nights are colder in the mountains, I notice, and wish I could shake grandfather, demanding why he ever left this place in search of America. I dream I am a soldier roaring in the face of my enemy, pouring out my soul with each shot of my rifle, defending my blood-soaked homeland, defending my God, defending the history I have found in this place. In these moments of quiet, I can’t help but smile and am glad no one is sitting here with me to watch me hold back tears of heavy emotion I cannot explain. I have not learned anything new in these few minutes, but I know something new. Centuries of history pass in a flash of solitude and I have a context. There is nothing else beside.