Loneliness is generally misunderstood. We feel solitude as loneliness, as hollowness, as something to be cured by distraction. But solitude is not a lack. It is presence, the presence of oneself alone, uncluttered, unobstructed, without the mirrors society holds out to us all the time. And we wonder: is such solitude required in order to know reality, or do we know reality only through other people?
The magnetism of modernity has always chased human beings. Prophets ventured into deserts, monks retired to caves, and writers shut their door to the world. They believed that truth, divine, existential, or aesthetic, illuminates itself best alone, away from crowds. Alone, delusions peel off: the mask we wear, the role we play, the vain chattering which stops our own minds. When all those are stripped away, what remains might be closer to reality.
And yet loneliness is hard work. To the rest of us, alone is frightening, not silence in itself, only that silence forces us to deal with that which we primarily avoid: our internal contradictions, our fears, our death. Life can be painfully unvarnished when there are no diversions of the world. Perhaps this is why solitude does not exist, because we know reality isn’t always comfortable.
But there is an odd irony: solitude uncovers, but warps. We are not alone; we are made up by others through language, culture, and values. If the world is relational—if what something is, comes from its environment—then solitude could limit the world to the restricted boundaries of a single head. A recluse could have profound truths about the self, but have no knowledge of the truth issuing from intercourse, from an encounter of point of view. For reality, then, is not isolated; it is relational.
Is solitude more essential, or connection? Or maybe the answer lies in neither, but in the tension between both. Solitude peels away illusions; connection puts those observations to the test against reality. Alone, we find the rough edges of reality; together, we hone and question them. Too much solitude, and we risk illusion. Too little, and we are swamped in noise, never hearing the faint whisper of truth.
Maybe solitude is more a state of being than of physical withdrawal. One can be surrounded and still be isolated within, resisting the inevitable compulsion to be like everybody else. One can be quiet but still be attracted to noise in the head. Solitude at its most fundamental is not so much absence as being totally present with the world, bare, unmediated, maybe only for an instant.
Must we have solitude to understand the truth? Yes, and no. We need it because it offers room for the truth to begin to speak. But it is insufficient, since the truth is not single-voiced. Reality is too big to be known either in isolation or in society; it glows in the space between the two, and we must discover a way of combining the courage to be alone with the modesty to be in the company of others.
Perhaps that is why the wisest wisdom comes most frequently in solitude, but only gains its meaning when re-translated into the world; solitude is the gateway, and not the destination.