Donne, who was then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, was  quarantined in his Deanery bedroom. From there, all alone, he listened to funeral bells tolling. The sense of isolation was terrible.

As Sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist, from coming…Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

This experience inspired Donne to write his famous reflection on the natural unity of humankind. ‘I am involved in mankind as a whole,’ he wrote.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

‘I am involved in mankind as a whole’. Today we are all involved in the fate of humankind as a terrible infectious virus spreads relentlessly across the globe. Here in the UK we  imagine that being an island nation, cut off from ‘the main’ except by boat, train or plane, will help to protect us from the Covid pandemic. Our government, like other governments of wealthy nations, buys up vaccines to protect the population. Meanwhile millions of people in poorer nations go unvaccinated, unprotected, and today we are all reaping the consequences.

Omicron, first detected by the excellent immunologists of South Africa, is spreading rapidly across the globe. We don’t yet know how serious this variant is for vaccinated populations but in countries without sufficient vaccine supplies infections are rising very fast. And until people in these countries have access to vaccines, the longer term picture is very bleak.

Dame Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford and a key figure in the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine, warns that unless the global community wakes up to the dangers it faces, the next variant of Covid, the next global pandemic, could be much worse than we’ve experienced thus far.

Sir Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust who recently quit the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) after expressing ‘concern’ at the government’s handling of the pandemic, writes in The Guardian (4 December 2021)

We will only bring this pandemic to an end by working together globally and sharing access to all the vital public health tools needed to reduce transmission everywhere and save lives. It is staggering and utterly frustrating that, two years on, governments still haven’t woken up and realised this is in their enlightened, shared self-interest.

It is ‘incredible’, Farrar goes on to say, that the World Health Organisation is still pleading desperately for funding to aid in ending this pandemic.

And what about our island nation, and its role in all this? A leading campaign group for a global vaccination programme, the People’s Vaccine Alliance, on December 5th released figures showing that 20m people in the UK have received booster or third vaccinations, while at the same time only 20 million people across 27 low-income countries have  been fully vaccinated. The inequality is astonishing, shaming and hugely dangerous to us all.

The Covid pandemic has been terribly hard on countless millions. Elsewhere on this website we have posted blogs that describe the impact of social distancing and enforced solitude on UK individuals and households. Even as people have recognised the need for such measures, the psychological and practical toll has been very high – much higher for some people and communities than for others. Covid has not hit all Britons with equal force.

But now we remind ourselves that on a global level, the terrible sufferings and losses resulting from this pandemic reflect unconscionable inequalities across the world, as rich nations continue to turn their backs on poorer countries. Will this change? Are our leaders frightened enough now to effect change?

No country is an island, all peoples – all of humanity – are part of the ‘main’. This island nation can no longer afford to be an island. Otherwise, for all too many of the global community, including us here in the UK, ask ‘not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.’

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post No island is an island: Covid and the deadliness of willed isolation appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Here two leading historians, Thomas Dixon and Tom Laqueur, discuss emotional connections between humans and animals, especially dogs, and how these connections affect our experiences of solitude.

Thomas Dixon (@ProfThomasDixon) is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain (2008) and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (2015).

Thomas Laqueur is Professor of History at University of California Berkeley. He is the author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003) and The Work of the Dead: a Cultural History of Mortal Remains (2015).

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post A Creature for Whom It Matters That You’re There appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

(Mary Wollstonecraft, 1796)

I want to be Andrew Scott’s mother. By ‘Andrew Scott’ I mean the award-winning Irish actor who played the hot priest in Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. By ‘mother’ I mean mother, although Scott has a perfectly good mother already (Nora, a former art teacher). By ‘want’ I mean I desire to be Scott’s mother because in this mad pandemical world the line between the feasible and the fantastical has dissolved. Ordinary pleasures of a year ago – dinner with friends; going to a concert; cuddling a grandchild – have become impossible dreams. So why not dream the impossible?

I’ve never met Andrew Scott.  I think he’s a terrific actor: I loved him in Fleabag and everything else I’ve seen him in. In September he gave an in-camera performance at the Old Vic of Three Kings, a one-man play written for him by his former partner, Stephen Beresford. The play was scheduled for July 31^st but a few days before I got an email saying it was delayed by Scott’s admission to hospital for ‘minor surgery’. No details, except the issue was ‘not serious or COVID-related’. In early August I received another email saying Scott was still not well enough to perform.

The weeks passed and I became anxious. My younger stepson works at the Globe; one of his closest friends is a top director. His husband is a novelist who has written for the stage. Their world is full of thesps: could they find out what was wrong? No. I fretted more. I asked some friends connected to the London theatre world. No joy there either.

In early September Scott performed Three Kings, to rave reviews. I searched his face, was he really alright? By now it’s fair to say that I was Scott-obsessed. I viewed online interviews, checked out his personal history, re-watched him as the hot priest. Adorable.

I’m not given to infatuation with performers; Elvis in G.I. Blues was the last. But I know infatuation when I feel it. This was something different. It took me time to name it. It was mothering-hunger.

I’m not a mother. But I’m rich in stepsons, nieces and nephews, godsons and goddaughters, and now two grand-godchildren, born during the pandemic. My wife has four living siblings, with dozens of children and grandchildren between them. My COVID world is full of next-generation family.

But I’ve become greedy. I want to add Scott to the mix, I want him as my boy (he’s 44, I’m 70). My family will love him, and he’ll fit in well. Thespianism? We’ve got that covered. Queer? Yep, we’re good there. Irish? My older stepson teaches philosophy in Galway. Celebrity? One of my brothers-in-law is a famous haircutter; in recent interviews Scott reminds me of him, the same well-rehearsed casual charm, the open shirt, the finger-tossed hair. Another brother-in-law is a leading stunt director; for all I know Scott may have worked with him. So he will be right at home with us.

So why not? Desire is never reality-bound. And when desire confronts disease and death it can blaze up, reaching out to life, insisting on it, demanding more of it. I want Scott because he is more of what I already have. But my son Scott also represents what I will never have – a son of my own. Not once, in all my decades of childlessness, have I hungered for motherhood as I do now, to love a life born from me, now that death is everywhere around me.

Globally COVID-19 has claimed two million lives and rising. The UK’s death rate is one of the highest in the world. One friend has died from it, another has been severely disabled. People who lose loved ones to other diseases cannot come together to mourn them. My wife lost a brother to oesophageal cancer during the first lockdown. The same disease killed a close friend of mine in early December. He lived in Toronto and his partner is my oldest friend. I should be there with her now. What hellish fate has stuck me here in London while my dear friend mourns far away? A misery of separation that I’m sharing with thousands of others across the globe. My widowed friend has two sons who cannot put their arms around her. My stepsons and I cannot hug; we might kill each other. Love and death in close embrace: an eternal theme of literature, art, drama – now made a quotidian reality.

Life revolts. Fleabag shows a young woman seesawing between sexual encounters in the wake of her mother’s death and the suicide of her closest female friend. Finally she falls in love with a Catholic priest (Scott) who chooses God over her. Death has sent her careening toward the impossible. At one point, to cover for her sister’s miscarriage in the middle of a fraught family outing, Fleabag pretends that she’s miscarried. For her, there never was a baby. But it’s the priest’s ‘beautiful neck’ that she finds irresistible. Scott does indeed have a good neck, but who cannot find a baby’s neck irresistible?

Passionate sex after funerals is a well-known phenomenon. Female sexual desire is said to have increased during the pandemic. But eros takes many forms. Child-yearning, as Lucy-Hughes Hallett labels it in Peculiar Ground (2017), can be as exigent as lust. Will there be a baby-boom in the wake of COVID? Not for me; and anyway it’s not baby-mothering I want but a gorgeous actor-son who exudes playful vitality.

In interviews Scott repeatedly describes acting as playful. He loves Picasso’s famous remark that ‘It took me my whole life to paint like a child’. I don’t know if Scott has ever read the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, but for Winnicott play is the life-force. Play, in children and adults, is where dreams are enacted, where fantasy and desire find creative expression. In play, people become themselves, for good or ill, and this is exciting, joyful, dangerous. When Scott played Hamlet in 2017, he surprised audiences by showing the young prince as full of fun. Why this portrayal?

If you don’t understand that Hamlet had a great joy for life, if you think that for the length of time that he was on the earth he was always depressed, well the release from life isn’t really that tragic…[but] If you think it was somebody who was full of life, and engagement, and fun, that has now just been totally sucker-punched by grief and doesn’t want to be alive anymore, I think that’s much more telling, and much more of a consuming story. (Evening Standard, 26.11.19)

Sucker-punched by grief…an image for our times. So how do we go on playing in the face of disease and death, and fear of death? We reach out for what we have; we dream of what we want. Scott’s emergency surgery, back in July, triggered a new dream in me. Anxious for him, I clutched fearfully at what I already have – the family and friends I love – and conjured up an ideal supplement: a fantasy-son, fully recovered, to accompany me through this dark time to a play-filled life beyond.

*

A note on this blog:

Solitariness breeds fantasy. This has been a truism since antiquity. Meditating alone, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius was visited by ‘fancies’. Christian hermits and medieval anchorites saw visions. The sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne, sequestered in his tower room, rode the ‘wild horse’ of his imagination. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wandered alone through natural landscapes, full of ‘ecstatic reveries’. Romantic solitaries soon followed his example.

But what about now, as millions live in enforced isolation? The COVID pandemic, with its terrible toll of death and loss and longterm illness, has inflicted misery worldwide. Social distancing and lockdowns have created new levels of solitariness which many find excruciating. But this solitude has also given free rein to fantasy.

Here we are posting a series of ‘Lockdown Fantasies’ showing how pandemical solitariness plays on the imagination. This is the first. Come back for more, and dream your own. 

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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Bear, by Marian Engel, stormed the bestseller lists in Canada and the USA. A UK edition was published by Pandora Press in 1988 but it got little attention. Perhaps the book’s ‘peculiarly Canadian’ theme (as one reviewer delicately put it) was a turn-off; I regularly press copies on British friends, none of whom have admitted to reading it.

Lou, Bear’s human protagonist, is a librarian-archivist working at a Historical Institute in a large Canadian city.  She is a ‘mole’, a lonely, flabby thirty-something who spends her days burrowing amidst dusty files in the Institute basement.  Once a week, she and the Institute’s Director cheerlessly couple on her desk. Then one summer she is sent off to catalogue a library bequeathed to the Institute by the descendant of a colonial family.

The family home housing the library is on a remote island in the northern bush. Lou will be there on her own, with back-up only from Homer, a mainland storekeeper who boats in supplies now and then. The prospect of this wilderness existence intoxicates her – and then she discovers the bear.

The bear is a pet of the deceased estate-owner.  Lou will feed him during her stay while his future is decided. He lives at the end of a chain behind the house, and at first Lou is dismayed by his large smelly presence. But he’s a gentle brute who – so long as she shits beside him every day, so that he can smell her odour – will do her no harm. They become buddies, swimming together and hanging out in the study where Lou does her cataloguing. The physical companionship is welcome; Lou enjoys rubbing his pelt, tickling him. Then one evening, stretched out in front of the fireplace, she begins to masturbate. The bear decides to join in and starts to lick her:

The tongue that was muscular but also capable of lengthening itself like an eel found all her secret places. And like no human being she had known it persevered in her pleasure. When she came, she whimpered, and the bear licked away her tears.

The relationship becomes an idyll, with the woman joyously exigent (‘eat me bear!’) and the bear wonderfully obliging (especially when she lathers herself in honey). But there’s a pressure inside Lou for more. The bear does not desire her, he is merely grooming her. ‘Claw out my heart, bear’ she whispers, tempting him. ‘Tear my head off.’

She dreams about the Devil and aggressive sprites who want to ‘eat her breasts off’. On one occasion she tries to mount the bear, to entice him to penetrate her, and afterwards feels guilty and wretched. ‘She had gone too far. There was something aggressive in her that always went too far.’

Then one evening, as they are snuggling, the bear becomes aroused. Lou, profoundly excited, crouches down before him – and the bear reaches out a paw and rips her back. The moment of violence is extraordinarily shocking. But the violence is not inside the bear – who feels no rage, no malice, is only doing what excited bears sometimes do – but in Lou, who has yearned for this physical explosion of destructive energy.

She is badly torn; looking at herself in the mirror the next day she knows that she will always carry the scar of her lover’s claw. But with this wounding she is purged of the depressive misery that has haunted her. She feels clean, peaceful, ready for anything. She returns to the city, while the bear goes to live with a local indigenous woman. Lou waves goodbye as they part but he doesn’t look after her: ‘She didn’t expect him to.’

Bear has been read in many ways: as a manifesto for female sexual empowerment; as a parody of Canadian wilderness literature; as pornographic pastoral. It’s probably all of these, but one of the keys to the novel comes early on when Lou compares her situation to Robinson Crusoe. ‘People get funny up here when they’re too much alone,’ Homer the shopkeeper tells Lou, and the perils and pleasures of solitude are a central theme.

Lou has a passion for solitude. In the city, this craving has merely left her lonely; but now, stuck on the island with her ursine beau, she has found the perfect solitary scenario. ‘Not everyone is fit for silence,’ she thinks, but her bear emphatically is, affording her company and pleasure while leaving her quietude unbroken. The bear licks and probes her, but he does not intrude upon her. She can ‘paint any face’ on him that she likes, she reflects, since his actual expressions mean nothing to her, as hers mean nothing to him. With him, she has that accompanied aloneness that animals, especially dogs, have so long provided to human solitaries.

*

The female solitary is a controversial figure. What do women get up to when they’re on their own? One of the few hostile reviewers of Bear slated it as ‘spiritual gangrene… a Faustian compact with the Devil.‘ This man may have been out of sync with majority opinion but the link between female eroticism, solitude and the Devil is ancient.

Throughout western history solitude has been regarded as morally hazardous for both sexes, but the dangers have always been judged far greater for women than men. The Devil – an omnipresent peril for solitaries until well into the eighteenth century – was especially on the lookout for lone women whose weaker natures presented opportunities. Withdrawal from male observation posed the greatest risk. ‘The farther a woman goes from her husband, the nearer she approaches to her destruction,’ the 14^th century poet Petrarch wrote in reference to Eve’s diabolic seduction.

Nowhere in Genesis is Eve depicted as alone when she picks the forbidden fruit, yet nearly all commentators on the Fall portrayed her as having wandered off from Adam. In Paradise Lost John Milton depicts Eve cajoling Adam into gardening apart for a time, with its inevitable disastrous consequence. Erotic images of Eve’s serpentine corruption proliferated.

Lou’s bear is no diabolic lothario, but her imagination makes him into a perfect lover, a virtuoso of masturbatory ardour. This too has a long history. Solitude is a notorious breeder of autoerotic fantasies. In the eighteenth-century these became the focus of a widespread moral panic, and a rich source of pornographic imagery.

The solitary female novel-reader was a particular object of moral opprobrium and sexual fascination. A woman alone in her boudoir with one hand clutching a romantic novel while the other stroked her genitals was a favourite of porn artists. Small dogs often featured, sometimes performing cunnilingus while the woman read.

Bear is a richly comic commentary on this pornographic tradition, as well as a contribution to it. But it has another link to the solitude tradition. For Lou’s erotic adventure is also a ‘high, whistling communion’ with the spiritual. Working her way through the old library, she discovers that its owner was a collector of ursine legends. Notes drop out of books telling her about the bear as the ‘Dog of God’, a ‘Great Spirit’ ‘older and wiser than time’.

Bear was originally titled The Dog of God. Marriages between women and bears had been a recurrent myth (a Haida version of this gave Engel the conclusion to her novel.) The sacred lore fills Lou with reverent joy. Her affection for her bear deepens into a passion; she ‘thought sometimes that he was God’. She yearns to give herself to him completely, to couple with her ‘well-beloved honey-eater’ who, unlike any of her human lovers, has fulfilled her, body and soul.

Eroticised religiosity and the sacralisation of nature are linked phenomena that have featured among solitaries for centuries. But Lou’s bear is no deity. One night she is visited by the Devil who mocks her adoration of her ‘tatty old pet’. ‘Be a good girl, now, and go away. No stars will fall in your grasp.’

Lou ignores the warning. But when, a few days later, the bear finally accepts her invitation to mount her and wound her back, she awakens to his animality. If the bear smells her blood he will attack her. She chases him away. The encounter between them the next day is friendly but the sacred communion has dissolved. The bear is only an old bear. Yet something vital has passed from him to her. The ‘breath of kind beasts’ has been upon her. The sweet wild sex of solitude has worked its magic on her. She packs up and drives back to the city at night, feeling strong and pure, with the Great Bear shining down on her.

[i] The first paragraphs of this blog are adapted from my contribution to a feature, ‘Desert Island Texts’, that appeared in Women: A Cultural Review (2010).

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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Involuntary solitude has always been a feature of human society. Disease has often been a factor. In medieval England people suffering from leprosy (Hansen’s disease, as it is now known) were stigmatised and shunned. Many were confined to leper-houses but some wandered the countryside, begging. Others, if the disease was not too obvious or debilitating, tried to carry on as normal. But they were subject to severe sanctions.

People suspected of having leprosy might find themselves legally ejected from society. In 1420 the sheriff of Lincolnshire was chastised by the courts for failing to have carried out an assessment of a Boston mercer, John Louth, who

commonly mingles with the men of the aforesaid town and communicates with them in public as well as private places and refuses to remove himself to a place of solitude, as is customary and as it behoves him to do, to the serious danger of the aforesaid men and their manifest peril on account of the contagious nature of the aforesaid disease [1].

Many other communicable diseases, most famously the bubonic plague, forced people to sequester themselves, in their case as a preliminary to almost certain death.

But seclusion was widely acknowledged to have its own dangers. From antiquity onward, people had been warned about the pathological effects of solitariness. Too much solitude was said to breed a host of debilitating symptoms, ranging from depression (melancholy) and extreme anxiety to wild fantasising and outright insanity. In 1621 the Oxford don Robert Burton, in his compendious Anatomy of Melancholy, counselled his readers to avoid solitude, for those that were solitary risked ‘fear, sorrow…discontent, cares, and weariness of life’.

Even people whose vocations drew them to solitude were said to imperil their psychological health. The 14^th century Italian poet Petrarch wrote a famous panegyric to his solitary lifestyle (De Vita Solitaria, 1346), yet even his ‘sweet solitude’ was marred by bouts of acedia, a combination of ennui and gloom from which reclusive scholars, monks and hermits were also said to suffer. Jesus counselled his followers to ‘pray to thy Father in secret’ (Matthew 6:6) but throughout Christian history solitary worship was – and remains – contentious.  Here the risks were as much moral as psychophysical. As happened with Eve in Eden, Satan lay in wait for solitaries, tempting them with forbidden desires. ‘Solitude is one of the devil’s scenes’, John Donne, poet and Dean of St Pauls Cathedral, sermonised on Easter day 1630.

Seven years earlier Donne wrote about unwanted solitude in words that have special resonance for us today, as we self-isolate to protect ourselves from Covid 19. Of course many of us are not living alone but in households, sometimes very crowded ones, as we long for healthier times to return. But aloneness is the fate of many. In an article posted on History Workshop Online this month, David Vincent and I discussed the impact of this solitariness. Our article begins with Donne’s cri de coeur from his lone sickroom:

As Sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude; when the infectiousness of the disease deters them who should assist, from coming…Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.

The rest of our article is available to read here.

[1] Euan Roger, ‘Living with Leprosy in Late Medieval England’, National Archives blog, 5^th November 2019.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post A Torment Not Threatened in Hell Itself appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Was solitude the ‘palace of learning’ that many learned people, religious and secular, perceived it, or a debilitating state of solipsistic misery and intellectual degeneracy, as its enemies described it? In the mid-eighteenth century the debate became fiercely personal during a public quarrel between two philosophical luminaries: David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the 1760s Rousseau faced persecution from state and church authorities in France and Switzerland. Hume gave him refuge in England. The relationship rapidly turned toxic as the convivial Hume sought to manage his notoriously reclusive charge. Solitude became a casus belli in a war of words that fascinated intellectual Europe. But the fracas was more complex than it appeared.

Who are we with, when we are alone? For Hume, no less than Rousseau, the question proved inescapable, in both his personal career and his philosophy. A closer look at two thinkers who, on the surface, were a study in opposites, reveals much about the vicissitudes of solitude in the life of the creative mind.

Barbara Taylor’s article on this subject in History Workshop Journal can be read here.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

The post Philosophical Solitude: Hume VS Rousseau appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Gwen Adshead is a consultant forensic psychotherapist who previously worked at Broadmoor Hospital and is currently based at the West London NHS Trust and the Central North West London NHS Trust. She has authored and co-edited many papers and books, including A Short Book About Evil (2015).

Shokoufeh Sakhi is a researcher based in Canada who, in the 1980s, spent eight years as a political prisoner in Iran. Iran’s prisons were notorious for their brutality, including their use of particularly cruel forms of solitary confinement. Shokoufeh Sakhi spent many months in solitary confinement, an experience that she discusses in the 2002 film The Tree That Remembers, made by Iranian filmmaker Masoud Raouf to document Iranian political exiles in Canada and their experiences of imprisonment in 1980s Iran.

The conversation between Shokoufeh Sakhi and Gwen Adshead can be heard here.

The film The Tree That Remembers can be viewed here.

The post Enforced Solitude and Solitary Confinement appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

…the company of many is grievous unto me, and… contrariwise, solitariness is a great comfort and ease… for I feel it a great travail to my mind, to understand other men’s talk, to frame fit answers thereto… But when I withdraw myself into my lodging either to read or write, or to repose myself: then I recover my liberty, and let loose the reins thereof, in such sort, that having not to yield account of itself to any, it is altogether applied to my pleasure and comfort.

Annibale takes issue with his friend, deploying Galenic humoural theory to caution Guazzo against the dire medical consequences of social withdrawal. Humoural theory held that healthiness depends on a balance between four bodily fluids (humours): blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Melancholy arose from a superfluity of black bile, to which solitaries were famously prone. Annibale warns Guazzo (in an odd choice of metaphor) that ‘like unto the fly which flies about the candle’, by opting out of society Guazzo will not ‘consume and starve’ his melancholy but ‘nourish’ it:

For thinking to receive solace by means of a solitary life, you fill yourself full of ill humours, which take root in you, and there lie in wait ready to search out secret and solitary places conformable to their nature…and as hidden flames by force kept down are most ardent, so these corrupt humours, covertly lurking, with more force consume, and destroy the faire palace of your mind.

Not satisfied that he has yet persuaded Guazzo to abandon his reckless plan, Annibale goes on to regale his hapless friend with tales of solitaries who, becoming ‘lean, forlorn, & filled full of putrified blood’, ‘fall into such vehement and frantic fancies [fantasies], that they have given occasion to be laughed at, and pitied’, until finally they terminate their miseries by ‘making themselves away by the means either of water, or fire, or sword, or by throwing themselves headlong from on high’.

The prospect must be terrifying; but Guazzo stands his ground, insisting that solitariness is a ‘Paradise’ to him and marshalling in his defence the poet Petrarch’s famous championship of solitude in his De Vita Solitaria (1346-56). Annibale is ready for this however, pointing out that ‘notwithstanding all the praises he [Petrarch] attributes to the solitary life’, the poet fully acknowledged that ‘without Conversation our life would be deficient.’ For Petrarch, Annibale continues, ‘was no enemy to good company’; nor should Guazzo be so, lest he end up mad or dead or, worse still, subhuman. Solitude was a ‘poison’ for which social interaction was the essential ‘antidote’:

And therefore it may justly be said, that who so leaves the civil society to place himself in some solitary desert, takes as it were the form of a beast, and in a certain manner puts upon himself a brutish nature.

Solitude is one of the most complex concepts in our cultural repertoire. Endlessly protean, its meanings have varied radically between periods and settings, or even within the same period and setting. Tracing its history is very challenging. But certain texts offer illuminations. Guazzo’s Art of Conversation is one such text. The ‘solitude’ decried there is that of the social refusenik, the individual who for a variety of reasons – spiritual, intellectual, temperamental or, as in Guazzo’s case, medical – turns his back on human companionship in favour of an isolated existence.

Solitaries of this ilk had been regarded as unnatural, immoral and pathological for millennia. Exceptions were acknowledged, but only among the god-like – saints, philosophers, creative geniuses – and even these were not exempt from criticism. For ordinary mortals, a reclusive life was malign and deeply perilous.

Yet alternative versions of solitude were also available. When, in The Art of Conversation, Annibale rightly points out that Petrarch did not eschew ‘good company’ he understates the poet’s position. In fact, good company was at the heart of Petrarch’s solitariness.

Book 1 of De Vita Solitaria describes his ‘solitude’ as a state of warm companionship with a small group of learned male friends (but no women, who Petrarch regarded as ‘poisonous’ to solitude), reading and conversing together ‘without complaint or grumbling, without envy or treachery’. ‘No solitude is so profound, no house so small, no door so narrow,’ Petrarch declared, ‘but it may open to a friend.’ To those critics who, knowing his reputation for reclusiveness, had charged him with misanthropy, he replied that he had never urged anyone to ‘despise the laws of friendship. I urged them fly from crowds and not from friends.’

Yet in Book 2 of De Vita Solitaria Petrarch praised hermits and other holy men whose total isolation was ‘most favourable’ to divine communion: an ambivalence reproduced by many early modern writers as they shuttled between a ‘solitude’ of absolute aloneness and the convivial solitude of likeminded intimates. In 1518 the great humanist scholar Erasmus highlighted this ambiguity in an imaginary dialogue between a Carthusian monk and a soldier. Like Annibale in The Art of Conversation, the soldier reproves the monk for his unnatural ‘Lonesomeness’, to which the monk replies that monastic life is necessary for his ‘perpetual study of Innocency’,

…and besides, if you call that Solitude which is only a retiring from the Crowd we have for this the Example, not only of our own, but of the ancient Prophets, the Ethnic [pagan] Philosophers, and all that had any Regard to the keeping a good Conscience. Nay, Poets, Astrologers, and Persons devoted to such–like Arts, whensoever they take in Hand any Thing that’s great and beyond the Sphere of the common People, commonly betake themselves to a Retreat. But why should you call this Kind of Life Solitude? The Conversation of one single Friend drives away the Tedium of Solitude. I have here more than sixteen Companions, fit for all Manner of Conversation… Do I then, in your Opinion, live melancholy?

To ‘live melancholy’ is what we now call ‘loneliness’: a condition widely described as a major health risk in terms not wholly unlike those employed by Annibale in The Art of Conversation. We have no words today for a Petrarchan solitude of friendship, although perhaps that is what social media offers to some of us. The language evolves[1]; but while the vocabulary and its historical settings have changed, cultural anxiety over solitary selfhood, the ‘I’ in relation to itself and others, is stronger than ever. As in Guazzo’s day, ‘solitude’ remains a perennial concern, and a perpetual puzzle, at the heart of western culture.

[1] I describe one of the biggest shifts, the abandonment of a discourse of moral evaluation, here.

Barbara Taylor is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary University of London and Principal Investigator on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project. 

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