Searching for Solitude

“Troll – in the dungeons,” reports Professor Quirrell, and the dining hall explodes in an uproar. “It took several purple firecrackers exploding from the end of Professor Dumbledore’s wand to bring silence.” For me, this moment in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone has taken on an almost totemic status. And the corresponding scene in the film is even more memorable. Richard Harris’s Dumbledore bellows before panicked swarms of students, stopping them in their tracks: “Si-llll-eeee-nce!” Before, more softly, saying “Everyone will, please, not panic.”

My generation (Gen Z) is prone to panic in the face of concerns about the world around us, and how it is treating us. We have also apparently lost out on leadership from Dumbledore-like figures exhorting us to silence. If nothing else, we need to listen. After the earthquake and after the fire, we need to stop and listen to the still small voice.

This can be done amidst the world and its business. Solitude can be accomplished without silence, provided we feel somewhat alone. Its clearest expression, however, is in times of actual silence, when it feels as if the world stops. This is because we must stop. And when we do so, we will feel more singular for a time but ultimately better connected with others because more fully at home with ourselves.

Carol Aust, Rooftop #3. Used by permission.

In an ongoing wave of books on solitude and silence many others are thinking along these lines. Michael Harris’s Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World (2017) was hailed as timely in a world of social media and smartphones. Cardinal Robert Sarah contributed to the conversation with The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise (2017), and he returned to the theme in 2019 with The Day Is Now Far Spent, calling out “the decadence of our time,” which had “all the faces of mortal peril.” When Covid hit in late 2019, the ensuing lockdowns forced a much larger number of people to reflect on the subject. Now 2024 releases such as Sarah Anderson’s The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet and Netta Weinstein, Heather Hansen, and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen’s Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone are prompting me and other zoomers to take initiative and seek silence.

As Freya India put it, “Some of us don’t have friends anymore; we have followers…. Social media platforms took friendship and made it another boring thing to do on a screen.” Therefore, withdraw from the screen. These authors all agree that we need to get more comfortable with solitude, in silence if we can. This is the kind of withdrawal that will allow us to rediscover true friendship, and change the world for the better.

It is striking that many of the most beloved Christian authors knew the importance of silence and solitude in their own lives. C. S. Lewis, for example, used to go to a pond outside his Oxfordshire home early in the morning, “in the before-breakfast solitude,” for a swim. Tellingly, he was open to others joining his experience, as he wrote, “I wish you could join me as I board the punt … and push out from under the dark shadow of the trees onto the full glare of the open water, usually sending the moor hens and their chicks scudding away into the reeds with a delicious flurry of silver drops. Then I tie up to the projecting stump in the middle and dive off the stern of the punt.” Silence. That “pool of perfectly still water” features in The Horse and His Boy alongside a house like the one Lewis bought in 1931, a place apart from the university. In 1945 Lewis wrote, “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.” He was attempting to break down the worldly distinction between being alone and being together. We should aspire, in both settings, to be lost in the divine love that God has for us. In this quest, being alone and being together complement one another. We can love one another in silence.

This was my experience in 2020. During successive lockdowns, many found solitude, though not always silence. Happily, I had both. I had more time to read, and write, and pray. One person I read a lot of was the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen, who writes that God sometimes wants us to be alone. We should aspire to “convert” our loneliness – the God-shaped hole in our lives – into a “deep solitude” where we are fully present to our inner self. In turn, we can be fully present to others.

A few years ago, I went around the United Kingdom visiting hermit-like figures, some of whom are mentioned in Sarah Anderson’s The Lost Art of Silence. In 2019, I found myself having tomato soup with an aged Northumbrian hermit called Harold Palmer. He greeted me, a total stranger, with hands outstretched, and an infectious smile on his face beneath his Thomas the Tank Engine bobble hat. Here was a man who had been mostly cut off from the rest of humanity for almost half a century. Yet in the two hours I spent with him, he felt more human to me than anyone I had ever met before. So, I decided to give this business of quiet contemplation a chance. I knelt upstairs in one of the one-up, one-down cells he had constructed at his hermitage outside of Alnwick (the setting of Hogwarts in that Harry Potter film). Silence. It was one of the most profound experiences of silence in my life to date. Indeed, it was in those moments that I came to forgive people who had hurt me because, so far as I felt used by them, I had used them to carry me to this place where I felt whole again. We were apart, yet we were better connected. This was also my experience during the Covid lockdowns, when I intentionally implemented what I had learned on that windswept Northumbrian hillside.

The Lost Art of Silence arose from its author’s “peak experience,” one not dissimilar to my own. For Anderson, it was a moment of “profound silence” once upon a time on a boat in the Atlantic that gave her a “deep peace,” and she has been striving to rediscover it ever since. This phenomenon is also identified in Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone: “Though the moment may be fleeting, the recollection of it is often long-lasting.” The authors associate it with the concept of “self-actualization” introduced by American psychologist Abraham Maslow. They also suggest that Maslow saw the connection between solitude and self-actualization, and that those who know themselves will, in turn, be better equipped to change the world. Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa are given as examples. C. S. Lewis can also be named here because he became comfortable with solitude and serving others at home just as he embarked on his influential career in writing. His example is helpful because so down-to-earth. As Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone stresses, “peak experiences” are more common among those who serve other people and “within almost everyone’s reach regardless of life’s circumstances.” One does not need to go to the Atlantic but can find them at home.

Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone treats solitude as a potential wellspring of power for us all, citing case studies that have already demonstrated this. During the pandemic, however, leaders failed to recognize this potential. Instead, we were told the virus would be matched by a “mental menace of loneliness.” Nevertheless – or so the book argues – the lockdowns did not result in a new crisis of loneliness.

Some of us may remember discovering our own, more authentic inner selves during the pandemic. We discovered renewed vitality in our relationships, focusing on quality rather than quantity. And such a discovery is encouraging precisely because we live in “the lonely century,” as Noreena Hertz puts it in her book of the same name. The signs and symptoms of this loneliness predate the pandemic and our response. Lockdowns, therefore, were not a complete loss; on one level, they gave us an opportunity to fight back by learning to become comfortable with solitude. But many of us panicked. If more of us had taken time to seek silence and cultivate life-giving solitude in this period, then collectively we would be better off.

Our poor relationship with solitude and silence in the modern era has deep, complex roots. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), sociologist David Riesman argued that people seek more approval and acceptance from others as the physical distance between them diminishes and society becomes increasingly geared toward consumption. There is a corresponding decline in leadership, self-knowledge, and human potential. Like many of us before and after the pandemic, we are lonely despite being together. And this is because we are not comfortable with stopping, with solitude. 

Around the same time, Swiss philosopher Max Picard observed in the World of Silence (1948) that silence is the one thing that “does not fit into the world of profit and utility.” He lamented that it only existed in monasteries. Yet, he wrote, silence may be “secretly preparing for an invasion” against the noise. Clearly, we are still waiting for this invasion to take place, and that would help us on the road to solitude.

We still experience the lonely crowd. We still lament the lost art of silence. We still panic. The world is beset with problems. But it is not too late. Intentional time in solitude is necessary, and whether we are given silence or must find it, it is incumbent on every one of us to do what the psalmist tells us: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46.10). Then we will change the world.