As researchers on solitude, we have come to think of solitude and sociality as co-dependent. Our experiences of solitude are shaped by our experiences of social connection and vice versa. Here I offer some reflections on my own experiences, living with two others in London, and how it has got me thinking about the solitude and sociality of life in the time of COVID-19.

Work

For someone whose job revolves around very solitary practices of reading and writing, one might imagine that a lockdown should be a time of great productivity. But in the first few weeks of the pandemic I was struck by how hard it was to maintain focus. I am used to working from home, but rarely for an entire day, preferring instead to spread my working hours across two, three or sometimes four locations, making use of my home, my office at Queen Mary, as well as London’s numerous libraries and cafes. Such spaces serve different practical function in terms of the books, resources, comfort and caffeine on offer.

But living in lockdown has also emphasised the unacknowledged sociality of these places and the extent to which I lean on them to feed off the productivity, surveillance, support and conviviality of others.

They bring to mind our colleague Leo Coleman’s descriptions of urban solitude and the ways in which cities offer opportunities, in Coleman’s words, to ‘be alone with others’. Many of these moments – our daily commute, solitary lunch breaks, times spent reading in parks etc – may not appear social on the surface but offer an opportunity to be with others in an anonymous but no less present way.

When walking or running in the park I have been surprised how rejuvenating the presence of strangers has been. Now that the British people have been afforded ‘unlimited’ sunbathing and exercise, our local park has been busier than ever. Though I can’t relocate my desk there, it has become by far the most significant public space in my life and I’m glad for the abundance of others.

Difficulties in maintaining concentration have undoubtedly been compounded by news and anxiety about the pandemic in the outside world. This is after all a crisis in the age of the ‘attention economy’ and the devices which allow us to work from home are also portals to endless updates, analyses, dire predictions and accounts of suspicious visits to Barnard Castle. Though it is important to stay informed, it is easy to forget how the live feeds compete for our attention in ways that can be extremely counterproductive.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist Jenny Odell argues that the attention economy is not only a drain on our capacity to concentrate but also a threat to our sense of self and even free will.

‘Its not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without wilful thought and action is an impoverished one,’ Odell writes, ‘a social body that can’t concentrate or communicate is like a person who can’t think and act.’

Odell’s antidote to the attention economy is to carve out space for what she calls ‘deep attention’, to become engrossed not with a single task or problem per say but rather to a sense of space, community and local ecology. One of the pleasures of lockdown has certainly been the numerous discoveries made around our local area, including skateparks, orchards, swan’s nests and more. But learning to disconnect from the news cycle was as much a process of adaptation to the new normal than newfound powers of deep attention. Productivity, as ever, has come in waves rather than any constant flow.

Sociality

Outside of work hours, life in lockdown has been far from solitary. Video-calling technology is hardly new, but until now I have only used it sparingly. The surge in popularity of platforms such as Zoom and Houseparty have in no way superseded what me might call ‘traditional’ image and text based social media. These still run apace.

But instead the conference call has often stood in as proxy for conventional social gatherings. Afterwork drinks on a Friday, coffee breaks, Sunday lunch, boardgames, parties, birthdays, music festivals have all been attempted with remarkable ingenuity and varying success. My housemates and I have discovered the pleasures of dancing at a laptop screen until the early hours of the morning and seeing people halfway across the world doing the same.

Such activities seem to blur the lines between solitary and shared experience, offering a unique situation where we experience something of the world of the other, but are excluded from many aspects of a truly shared environment: the atmosphere of a room, sideways glances, cross-conversation, the touch and feel of others. I’m interested in this simulacrum of normality and the ways in which social conventions have evolved to replicate the old whilst accommodating the new.

As restrictions have eased, enthusiasm for digital socialising seems to be waning, but I often wonder how these technologies will be integrated into our lives post lockdown. Will we still dial in our laptop-based friends once the pubs reopen?

Did someone mention the pub? For many, this social hub seems to play an important role in their collective imagination. A symbol of life before lockdown and a potential marker of a return to normalcy. Its immediate offering of food drink, friends and even strangers seem to be obvious.

But just as the Zoom call might make us aware of what we are missing, I wonder if the return to such places might engender a further awareness of those subtle elements which we have previously taken for granted, the sounds, smells and chance encounters of a busy room. But I suspect any potential ethnographers or phenomenologists of the pub experience will have to act quickly. One of the things about returning to normality is that its relative novelty is extremely short lived.

Solitude

I am fortunate enough to have spent lockdown in a house of three, with my partner and housemate. For the most part, we have synchronised into the rhythm of each other’s lives finding ways to occupy our free time, with food, games, sports, crafts and conversation.

As such, complete solitude has not been thrust upon us, but is something we all make time for.

Though the rare pleasure of having the house to oneself is only ever fleeting in lockdown, I find such moments are most enjoyable when they are the counterpoint to a busy and hectic life.

There hasn’t been much FOMO during lockdown, but this also negates the possibility of the joy of missing out. Some time alone has of course been necessary to navigate the extraordinary nature of the last few months and the varying emotions that come with it, but I am grateful to be able escape solitude as well as to retreat into it.

Our project recently sent out a call for public testimonies about solitude (if you’re interested in contributing, you can do so here) and I’m interested to discover more about the different ways in which people are experiencing the solitude and strange sociality of these times. For now at least, I certainly long for the company of a crowd over my own.

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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Happy Singlehood describes the rising acceptance and status of singlehood as a global phenomenon. What do you think are the social and cultural changes contributing to this?

I detail the major reasons for this rising trend in my book. But in essence, we are more mobile today in search for opportunity and economic mobility and we don’t want to be tied down; we want more privacy and time to develop ourselves; we, especially women, are more independent and educated, and we don’t need others to support us; and finally, we are less conformist and traditionalist, so we need to be convinced that marriage is good for us and, after marrying, that we should hold on to marriage, especially if we see the dire consequences of unhappy marriage all around us.

Can you tell us something more about what it means to be happy in singlehood?

There are many aspects, but one example I found is that those who were happiest insisted they simply enjoyed their solitude and did not feel lonely or out of contact. In my study, some singles even testified that spending time with themselves is something they could not give up on, and that having that solitude relaxes them and makes them feel comfortable. For them, solitude is a time to be relished, even to be celebrated.

In what ways is solo living a solitary state of being?

I found that many singles are actually very social and friendly. They developed strong interpersonal networks. Often, these singles were the friendliest people my team and I interviewed, yet they needed that private space at the end of the day. Interestingly, some even reflected that their friendliness may even be the exact reason they yearned for solitude. When they returned home from an evening with friends, full of laughter and joy—the most important thing they needed was the chance to balance that joy with some quiet time.

What can those who are coupled learn from Happy Singlehood?

It is extremely important to feel complete by yourself, even if you are coupled. It is quite amazing how so many people force themselves into marriage because they need someone to assuage their fears. Studies show that people even go back to their exes just to escape the worries and feelings of loneliness. Happy Singlehood develops this inner feeling that no matter what, being yourself and by yourself is totally ok.

There has been much written (particularly here in the UK) about the apparent rise of loneliness. How does your work challenge stigma relating to singles and loneliness?

There is a huge misconception that being alone and lonely are the same. Similarly, married people can sometimes still feel lonely even if they are not “alone.” It was proven time and again in many studies that married people can be very lonely and emotionally deprived within wedlock. In contrast, single people can flourish outside of the marriage institution. Marriage is a certain level of commitment that doesn’t fit everyone.

Many can feel suffocated in such a perpetual and high level of commitment. We need to accept the notion of a wider scale of what it means to be committed: marriage, cohabitation, living apart and being together, occasional couplehood, and so on.

How might policy cater to the growing singlehood demographic?

Effective policies I’ve seen include development of suitable, small apartments with shared spaces so that singles will be able to interact with others and to create communities. As I said, my study shows that singles are more social than married people, so we just need to make sure they have ways to nurture their connections. Even more profoundly, we need to start educating students on how to accept singlehood and live happily even if they will find themselves alone. The Pew Research Center predicts that a quarter of today’s children will never marry, and around half of those who marry will get divorced. We must not ignore these statistics. More than anything, it is crucial to prepare today’s children for single living and even if married, to teach them to accept those around them who chose going solo or have lost their spouses through divorce or death.

Elyakim Kislev (@ElyakimKislev) is a faculty member at the Hebrew University. His book, Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living, is available now.

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The effects of isolation on the human mind have long fascinated psychologists, philosophers and artists. But it was during the Cold War that isolation, or at least a version of it, came under considerable scientific scrutiny. For a brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, sensory deprivation (SD) research was an established and well-respected field in North American behavioural sciences. SD experiments set out to examine the effects of a severely reduced stimulus environment on the human mind and had theoretical applications related to brain physiology, perceptual, motivational and psychoanalytic theory as well as clinical and practical applications.

After a brief heyday, the discipline all but disappeared in the 1970s as critics drew links between the military funding that supported much of this research and techniques of psychological torture. Of the dozen or so texts on sensory deprivation at Senate House, former Princeton professor Jack Vernon’s Inside the Black Room was the only one targeted at a non-specialist audience. That such an audience should exist was hardly surprising. SD experiments had appeared in films such as The Mind Benders (1963), The US television series The Twilight Zone (1958), and on the BBC’s A Question of Science (1957). Each of these, with greater or lesser degree of sensationalism, set out to examine its supposed mind-altering effects.

Fascination with sensory deprivation at the time was captured by Vernon’s copywriters, who wrote on the back cover:

What happens to a man when all sensory stimulation is cut off for a certain period time?… These questions are vital in a world concerned with space travel, solitary confinement and brain-washing?

But, for me, the front cover of this edition posed an entirely different and unexpected question: What was Johnny Cash doing on a popular psychology text from 1966? Curiosity, or procrastination, having got the better of me, I was able to find the original image by photographer Don Hunstein (1928-2017) online, who served as Director of Photography at Columbia Records for over 30 years. After making an inquiry through a website dedicated to his work, I received a response from Don’s wife DeeAnne.

DeeAnne informed me that Don had been a good friend of the graphic designer Germano Facetti, who often used Hunstein’s images on covers for Penguin books. Facetti’s decision to put Cash on his cover was perhaps more than opportunistic. As head of design at Penguin, Facetti is remembered for transforming the publisher’s art direction during his tenure (1960-1972) and gained a reputation for his ability to capture the essence of a book with a single image, providing what he described as, ‘a visual frame of reference to the work of literature as an additional service to the reader.’ In this case the subject was Jack Vernon’s ‘black room’, a sophisticated light and sound proof chamber in the basement of Princeton’s Eno Hall.

One of Vernon’s student volunteers described their first experience inside this space:

I entered the cell that was to become the deepest darkness I have ever known.

In Facetti’s monotone image, Cash can be seen either disappearing into or re-emerging from this sensory void, evoking a sense of mystery about what lies within and the changed person that might emerge from the chamber. The three dimensional cube enclosing the portrait adds to the sense of literal and psychological confinement, but may also refer to the red geometric shapes many subjects claimed to hallucinate whilst inside the chamber. One of the surprising results of sensory deprivation research from this period was that without visual referents or patterned stimuli, the mind appeared to spontaneously generate images of its own.

Part of the early fascination with sensory and perceptual deprivation experiments revolved around whether, in this disoriented state, the subject could be made more suggestible, susceptible to indoctrination – or in the parlance of the time ‘brainwashing’. That Vernon’s aforementioned student should choose the word ‘cell’ – as opposed to ‘chamber’ or ‘room’ – to describe the experience is suggestive of the ways in which volunteers may have consciously or unconsciously associated SD experiments with imprisonment.

In Inside the Black Room, Vernon describes another student who made this association explicit. Having stayed in the chamber for the maximum of four days, the politics student requested to stay longer. On further questioning the student revealed that he felt there was a high chance that he may one day end up as a political prisoner when he returned to his native Turkey, and that he wished to train himself to be able to tolerate solitary confinement.

The association between SD and the prison provides the most likely explanation as to why Facetti chose to put Cash on the cover of Vernon’s book. When the Penguin version was published in 1966, Cash had already gained a reputation for singing about and sympathising with the experience of incarceration in the US penitentiary system. Whilst early hits such as ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ (1955) and ‘Transfusion Blues’ (1960) contrasted a romanticised image of a care-free and cold-hearted outlaw with a life of confinement, later songs such as ‘San Quentin’ (1969) and ‘The Man in Black’ (1971) took direct aim at prison conditions, treatment of prisoners and US policies of incarceration.

But Cash’s most memorable interactions with the American prison population came during the numerous concerts his band performed inside prison walls, preserved in two successful albums, ‘Live at Folsom Prison’ (1968) and ‘Live at San Quentin’ (1969). At San Quentin, Cash sang, for the first time, a song named after the prison about the destructive experience of incarceration. Lyrics such as ‘San Quentin, I hate every inch of you/ You’ve cut me and you’ve scarred me through and through/’, were met with raucous applause from the audience who demanded a second rendition immediately after Cash sang the first.

On the ‘Live at Folsom’ record, Cash can be heard striking a more optimistic tone with ‘Grey Stone Chapel’, a song written by Folsom inmate Glen Sherley who was sitting on the front row. The songs refrain ‘inside the walls of prison my body may be/ but the lord has set my soul free/’ describes the role of religious devotion in the struggle for the free mind within an incarcerated body – a topic of central interest to our research project.

Cash’s prison concerts were performed against a backdrop of scandals, public outrage and calls for reform within the US prison system, of which he became a leading spokesperson. In 1972 he even gave evidence alongside former convicts at a Senate hearing on prison reform, where he relayed some of the worst stories of corruption and abuse inmates had told him.

Despite the outlaw image he cultivated, Cash himself never spent more than a night in a jail cell. The graphic designer who used his image on the other hand had experienced a horrific period of captivity during the Second World War. Captured as an armed member of the Italian resistance in 1943, Facetti was deported aged 17 to a labour camp in Mauthausen Austria, where 100s of prisoners died each day at the hands of the Nazis. After the camp was liberated in 1944, he gathered drawings he made alongside photographs and documents salvaged from the camp in a small box.

Bound together with fragments of his prison uniform and identification tags, the box is the subject of a short documentary, The Yellow Box, by Tony West. Facetti could not have known in 1966 that Cash would go on to have such an influence on US prison reform. Perhaps, however, he hoped that like Cash’s music, and like his own yellow box, Inside the Black Room might shed light on the experience of the incarcerated.

To what extent sensory deprivation experiments have contributed to the scientific understanding of incarceration is a complicated question. Early research, particularly the perceptual deprivation experiments carried out at McGill University in the 1950s, suggested that the effects of inhabiting a depatterned environment were inherently pathological. Certainly, studies in this area have shown that under the right conditions SD can induce high levels of anxiety, depersonalisation and perceptual distortion. Such data has often been used by critics of solitary confinement as well as methods of psychological torture such as the ‘Five Techniques’ used by the British Army in Northern Ireland or the methods of so called ‘enhanced interrogation’ used at detention centres such as Guantanamo Bay.

But other research into this field has shown that under the right conditions sensory isolation can have therapeutic potential. Flotation tanks, for example, once seen as a faddish new-age trend, are undergoing clinical trials as a treatment for both acute and chronic mental disorders. In fact, research on SD from the 50s and 60s has shown that the technique can produce a diverse range of responses which depend on a complex ecology of interacting variables, some of which are beyond the control of the experimental situation. The subjective experience of SD is not only influenced by the physical and temporal dimensions of the experiment, but also on the subject’s personality, mood, physiology and various other social and cultural factors.

SD experiments have given some insight into the unusual effects of extreme isolation, but we should be cautious when attributing these results to the significantly different experience of involuntary incarceration or other forms of isolation. Understanding these experiences often requires a far wider lens than the experimental setting can provide, taking into account broader psychological, social, and cultural factors. Perhaps, after all, Facetti’s choice of Johnny Cash on his front cover reminds us of the need to pay attention to the individual stories and experiences of incarceration and solitude and the complex histories that shape them.

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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