Barbara Taylor

When I was awarded the Wellcome Trust grant for this project I had ideas about the type of people with whom I would like to work, but never could I have imagined the wonderful team with whom it’s been my pleasure to collaborate over these last four years.

The appointment of Clare Whitehead as project manager gave us leadership that has been brilliantly efficient and wonderfully empathic. It was Clare who held the project together as it passed through some difficult times, most notably during the pandemic. She and I then went on to recruit Akshi, James and Charlie. In the final year of the project Tasha joined us.

What have we become to each other? Co-workers, friends: but also, I want to suggest, part of our inner lives, the realm of fantasy that we experience most powerfully when alone.

During the project I began to dream about members of my team. I felt myself drawn to them, as they are, but also to images of them. They are very different people although with much in common: personal warmth, generosity, a great sense of humour. I like to flatter myself that I share in these qualities, but over time I learned so much from them!

Sometimes the learning curve was steep. This was particularly the case with regard to issues of race and ethnicity where Akshi Singh took the lead and in doing so transformed our project. Her work, along with Nisha Ramayya and Tasha Pick, has resulted in some of the most exciting outcomes from the project, as is readily apparent from our website.

I am a historian of subjectivities. It’s long been my belief that understanding solitude is key to our understanding of human subjectivity. Solitude is not a unitary experience but a fantasy scenario, an imaginary staging of self that is far too complex, too psychically dense, to be captured by any simple opposition between absence and presence. Historians have been reluctant to tangle with this complex psychological state but history, I believe, offers us many insights. My own research is an investigation into this: into the long history of solitude as a story of what Aristotle dubbed phantasmata, the figures that appear in our dreams, but also – I argue – in our waking lives as fantasies of others, the unconscious inner presences that compose us.

Psychoanalysis offers many insights into these presences, but it has its limits. Literature, especially poetry (as James Morland shows) can be a rich source of imagery of solitariness that reach deep into people’s psychic lives, especially during experiences of bereavement and grief. Recent years, with the Covid 19 pandemic, have made such experiences all too common, especially in communities that lack the resources to deal with a major health crisis.

The enforced solitude of the pandemic pushed our project online. The meetings we had held in our ‘Solitude’ office at QM – with its delicious baked goods from James and Indian sweets from Akshi – abruptly came to an end. I found this extremely painful. These meetings had, for me, been joyful occasions (as were our informal meetings in each others’ homes). Suddenly my team went digital. The sense of loss was enormous. And the sense of loneliness that attends such loss. Now I really did need to hold my team in my mind, to feel their presence in their physical absence. Zoom was better than nothing but no substitute.

In this final blog I want to warmly thank all my team for the happiness they have brought me. I am sure we will keep in touch, but it will be different. I am so glad to have worked with them and to know that they will remain a part of me, both consciously and unconsciously, as we move our separate ways.

James Morland

Through the course of this project my research has become focused on the dualities of solitude in the eighteenth century. While the fact that solitude has positive and negative ramifications might seem a fairly obvious point, the way that these are expressed can give a nuanced history of how solitude has been seen and experienced. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, solitude was often a condition that enabled contemplation, but with that came severe risks. Solitude was a productive and perilous place to be. A moment of peaceful retirement in a shaded grove that brought a deeper connection with oneself or the divine, could also quickly turn sour if the mind turned to ‘sickly musings’.

A late eighteenth-century example of this can be found in the English translations of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Solitude Considered with Respect to its Dangerous Influence Upon the Mind and Heart. Zimmermann argued for a balance between the ‘comforts and blessings of society’ and the ‘advantages of Seclusion’, with chapters attempting to balance the positive and negative effects of solitude. In the 1799 translation of Zimmerman’s treatise, a quotation from an English physician-poet, John Armstrong, appears at the opening of the chapter on ‘The Disadvantages of Solitude’, providing a poetic explication of the view of solitude ‘allowing a weak and wicked mind leisure to brood over its own suggestions [that] recreates and readers the mischief it was intended to prevent’:

Chiefly where Solitude, sad nurse of Care,

To sickly musing gives the pensive mind.

There Madness enters; and the dim-eyed Fiend,

Sour Melancholy, night and day provokes

Her own eternal wound.  [Preserving, IV.90-4]

Armstrong’s lines are used to depict what Zimmerman depicts as solitude ‘keeping the mind free to brood over its rank and noxious conceptions, [becoming] the midwife and nurse of its unnatural monstrous suggestions’. Solitude’s status as a midwife of its own ‘unnatural monstrous suggestions’ is key to understanding the duality of solitude across the century. Solitude’s withdrawal had a specifically curative and nourishing quality, hence its close association with the imagery of nursing, but simultaneously could allow a weakened mind to brood and foster its own melancholy habits.

But these dual aspects of solitude were not just confined to the eighteenth century and the continued questioning of the duality of solitude through history has been apparent throughout many of the conversations I’ve had with members of our research network. I’m so grateful to the network for enriching the ways I have thought about the history of solitude. Some of these connections have come through in the blogs published on our website.

Hetta Howes gave an insight into the conversely sociable solitude of the enclosed spaces of medieval anchoresses, where solitude ‘in its most perfect form [ends] up being full of sociable heavenly chatter’, itself a significant trope in eighteenth-century poetry where solitude allowed a deep connection with the divine. Nick Jones took us on a journey through outer space and notes that in these contemporary films while space ‘may have the potential to be overwhelmingly lonely, [this] serves not as an opportunity to sever all human bonds but a chance to remind ourselves  of their importance’, a point made by Mark Akenside, a mid-eighteenth century physician who argued that the a pensive ‘absent hour’ can remind one of the ‘sober joys of friendship’. Charlie Williams reflected on the rare pleasure of having the house to oneself in lockdown where ‘such moments are most enjoyable when they are the counterpoint to a busy and hectic life’, echoing Zimmerman’s balance between the ‘comforts and blessings of society’ and the ‘advantages of Seclusion’.

During the UK’s first period of COVID lockdowns, we began to form an archive of written testimonies about how the pandemic had changed people’s experiences of solitude. The responses often mirrored the dualities of solitude that I had been researching in eighteenth-century poetry. While for some the perils of solitude were evidently clear, there were also many pleasures to be found in the solitariness of lockdown. If for one person, a pandemic solitude ‘seems like the worst thing in the world’ for another the ‘forced solitude has given me time […] to re-evaluate what and who is important to us’. Solitude and contemplation have long been intimately linked, and these responses have echoes of the discussions between eighteenth-century poets and philosophers questioning what it means to ‘Know thyself’ in solitude.

While these accounts may not use the same language and diagnostics of ‘sickly musings’ or ‘sour melancholy’, there is a distinct similarity between these eighteenth and twenty-first century accounts of solitude. Solitude has historically been a difficult experience to explain, but its oppositional qualities have been central to attempts to define it.

A final thank you to the wonderful Solitudes team, who have become close friends and made time on this project a joy. They have been inspiring colleagues and have also been steadfast supports through difficult personal moments during the course of this project.

Charlie Williams

I have spent the past three years writing and thinking about the figure of the dropout in Britain and America during the early Cold War. Prior to this, ‘dropout’ had been either an administrative or derogatory term used to refer to university or school leavers, but in the 1950s and 60s it acquired far more loaded meaning; as a form of protest, a rejection of institutionalised life, experimentation with drugs and lifestyle, a symbolic identification with outsiders of various stripes, and often touted as a form of internal liberation or the start of a psychic journey. Though not all the counterculturalists that embraced the term dropout were solitaries (some actively rejected solitariness), much of the discourse on dropping out drew upon the long history of solitude. In our three years on the Solitudes Project it has been a privilege to work alongside our extensive research network and explore how themes of mental health, internal liberation, imprisonment, inner-dialogue, privacy, religiosity, individualism and sociality have percolated throughout the long history of intellectual thought on solitude. My research focuses on the way that the post war dropout reprised these themes amidst concerns about the growth of the human sciences and fears of so called ‘brainwashing.’ I’m incredibly grateful to all of those who participated in our seminars, colloquia and exhibitions, and those wrote blogs and contributed to podcasts for what they brought to the project and the way they have sharpened my thinking about the dropout.

Coming to the end of the project is also an opportunity to think about the past 3-4 years which, it goes without saying, have been unexpectedly turbulent times. For our team, the pandemic not only required us to change our way of work, but also to channel our focus into thinking about solitude and loneliness in the here and now. The testimonies we heard and discussions we had demonstrated the vast variety of lockdown experiences, too often felt unequally across society, which included overlapping feelings of loneliness, solitude as well as crowdedness and lack of solitude. The subtitle of my book, ‘the politics of disconnect’, refers to the 1960s interest in minds disconnected from mainstream culture, but it also speaks to contemporary discussions about the digital age. I suggest that in the last decade the utopian ethos that accompanied the arrival of the early internet has waned. Many of those same technologies that were once seen as connecting, creative and democratic have come to be seen as addictive, invasive and manipulating. But during the pandemic, many of us relied on our interconnected devices more than ever to mediate our social interactions. During one discussion, our colleague David Vincent pointed at that in many ways this moment revived that early vision of the internet as a tool of inventive sociality. As our research on solitude continues and merges with future projects, I am sure the conditions of the pandemic will remain an important touchstone in discussions about the role of technology in our solitary and social lives.

And finally, a massive thank you to the wonderful project team. Akshi, Clare, James and Tasha have been inspiring colleagues and cherished friends and I look forward to continuing our regular hangouts as we embark on our different journeys. On behalf of all of us, the last dedication goes to our fantastic project leader Barbara Taylor, who led the project with enduring curiosity, intellectual rigour and abundant warmth. We will miss her mentorship (generously supplemented with tea and biscuits) and the many great times we spent together hugely.

The post Final Blog: Who are we with when we are alone? appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

Solitude sounds like a sad word – one person stuck on their own, like on a desert island. COVID-19 solitude has not been like this for me. As a family unit, we have been isolated from friends and extended family but have been able to talk to people who we would not usually talk to. For example, neighbours whose faces we cannot see but who we can shout to over hedges.

Living as a couple who are used to being together as a unit is not a challenge. For our adult children separated from partners and friends, life has been much tougher. The positives for us have included having more time to spend with our children, who live with us, and having conversations about the meaning of life and everything! We have all had the chance to get to know each other as adults and we realise just how wonderful our children are.

Forced ‘solitude’ has given me time: time to get fitter, lose weight, do some art, sewing, daily yoga and meditations. The pace of life has been slower and more considered. Worry about the future consequences do creep in and and keeping these at a bay is hard at times. However, time to re-evaluate what and who is important to us has been good and now, beginning to meet people again is a joy.  

2.

I am an only child and grew up being very happy in my own company, reading, writing, listening to music and inventing new worlds in my imagination. My adolescence and early adulthood became a time of social anxiety when I was consumed by a desire to belong, to be part of a group, accepted and included. I began to associate solitude with ‘missing out’.

At university I struggled to fit in and felt lonely and isolated. Sitting alone in my room while other people were out socialising made solitude seem like failure.

When I left university my confidence grew and I constructed an image of myself as someone who was popular, sociable and always out and about. It became almost a compulsion and my hectic social life sometimes led me to burn out and become ill with exhaustion.

For me, lockdown has been a healing experience, an opportunity to reset and reflect. I have rediscovered the joys of my own company: simple pleasures like sitting on my sofa reading, writing, discovering new music, working through my years-long backlog of film and television recommendations or sometimes simply listening to birdsong through the window.

I am in frequent contact with friends via social media and phone and video calls and have begun to appreciate meaningful contact with a few important people rather than the superficial thrill of being part of a crowd. Now, as lockdown begins to ease, it is the prospect of the end of solitude which brings me anxiety.

I am a 34-year old archivist.

3.

Before the pandemic solitude was a rare thing in my life. Working in a constant customer-facing workplace, going to dance classes four times a week and having an active social life meant solitude was almost none existent and something I craved.

When lockdown hit and all these things stopped solitude kicked it very quickly and I felt very alone and unfamiliar. Over the weeks, however, I have started to appreciate solitude and see it more of a positive rather than a negative as a time for focusing on myself. Nevertheless I have massively missed my friends and family. I think COVID has taught me to try and use solitude wisely, but only ever in small doses so as not to allow loneliness to set in.  

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post The Unexpected Solace of Lockdown appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

For myself, solitude has always meant time spent completely alone in whatever environment. A chance to not have to converse and interact with others, and to literally ‘just be’ with my own thoughts, with no outside influences. Personally, I’m an individual who has long since realised that I require time to be alone to maintain my mental health.

COVID has meant a loss of this solitude due to the fact that both my husband and teenage son are now present at all times, and so I’m rarely completely alone. Whilst they make few demands, and are actively engaged in activities physically apart from me, they are still constantly present within the household, and there’s little opportunity for the true solitude I need. I look forward to a time when I’m completely alone again.

I’m a 47-year-old female, who suffers from depression and anxiety.

2.

Prior to the pandemic I found solitude whilst driving, which is part of my job, averaging four hours per day in the car alone. Sometimes this alone time left me feeling lonely and lethargic. However, other times I found the alone time to be productive; just me and my thoughts often helped me to think things through and overcome challenges.

With COVID-19 and the lockdown and being a parent, most days have been spent with my daughter, which has delivered a different type of solitude. I find myself missing contact with adults and feeling lonely in that respect but at the same time having no time to myself whilst my 5-year-old daughter needs entertaining and demands attention (which has also provided some magical father and daughter time and memories). Ultimately, both prior to and during lockdown, solitude for me has two sides to it. The side I experience probably depends my personal state of mind at the time.

I’m a 32-year-old father and husband; my wife is a key worker who worked many hours of overtime, especially in the early weeks of the lockdown.

3.

Before the pandemic solitude meant hours at home working, writing. Or walking alone with people in sight. Cycling. Having lunch on my own in a cafe, or coffee, always with something to read. Train journeys, also with something to read. Solitude was a way of immersing myself entirely in the selfish experience of food, books, or phone. In the early days of the pandemic, before lockdown, this didn’t change much; I cycled rather than used buses so had a bit more solitude.

The moment that schools closed everything changed. Since then I have been in the same space as my partner and child for 24 hours a day with the exception of a few hours of exercise. Solitary walks are hard to achieve, though early mornings are possible. Solitary work has vanished because of parental responsibility – the loss of the disciplinary structure of school means for a good part of each day I feel responsible for making my young teen work.

Solitude on the street or in the park is now fraught with concerns about social distancing; it is rarely possible to just wander. I’ve reclaimed a solitary space in the early morning, with a firmly closed door.

My child also longs for solitude, which for them is mediated by technology: any interruption from a parent is irritating, and the independence of solitary travel is a kind of solitude that they have had removed. On the other hand, they are forced for the first time to do school work for hours at a time with no company, so a forced and deeply unwelcome solitude.

I experience solitude also second-hand, empathising with my mother, who is in her 90s living on her own with dementia. She was content to live alone until told that she could not go out and people could not visit. Now she is desperate for structure and company. So she has lost the experience of solitude for one of loneliness and being unmoored.

I’m a woman in my early fifties.

4.

Before COVID-19, working as a teacher in a busy school and spending the majority of my free time with my husband, travelling across the country to spend time with family and friends, I don’t feel I experienced solitude a great deal. Spending so much time with other adults and children and keeping to a busy schedule meant I longed for solitude. I looked forward to my lonely runs and nights when my husband stayed away due to work commitments.

I initially struggle with change, so I was anxious about lockdown, but I found a new fitness routine, was given new ways to work and tried to make time at home fun. Staying at home with just my husband was a relief. Not being allowed to travel or attend events, gave us time back to slow down and removed social pressures, allowing us to spend quality time together.

I now worry about life going back to some form of normality and having to share my husband and our time again.

It is in my work life where I have experienced the most solitude. I am used to spending my day with 30 children, various members of support staff and in constant contact with outside agencies and parents/careers. My school decided we would not conduct online/video lessons but set work, which would be available each day on our school website.

Asking questions and setting work to no response has been tough, as I am used to adapting second by second to what the children do and say. I have felt lonely, sat at home on my computer waiting and hoping to receive emails from my children with pictures of their work. Sadly, only a small percentage of my class have been able to be in regular contact, which also means I have worried about their physical and mental health and how they are dealing with their solitude.

I do miss my own family and friends and spending time with them, but have found I am speaking to some of them more than I ever have done before, so I do not feel as removed from them as I actually am. As restrictions begin to be lifted and friends and family are meeting for socially distanced walks, etc., I can see I am beginning to feel some solitude, as living so far from many of them means I cannot spend time with them physically at all and do not know when I will be able to.

I’m a teacher in my early thirties.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post With or Without You: Solitude and Family Life appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

I have lived alone for 35 of my 76 years. Whilst I was working in a busy and demanding health related job, I welcomed my time alone in the evenings, although I always spent some evenings with friends or on activities that I enjoyed, and I normally went out of London at weekends, to be with family or friends.

With retirement, I realised that I would not be happy or mentally healthy if I did not interact with people frequently. And arranged my life so that I had lots of things to do, including church activities, school governorship, girlguiding and investigating family and local history. I have lived fairly happily in this way for 10 years.

The only times when I felt lonely, tended to be after spending time with family or friends, especially holiday times: on my return to my solitary home, it would take me some days to settle down and adjust to being alone again.

Lockdown has had a huge impact on me.  Unfortunately, I had a serious illness in March, which I have had to deal with alone.  (Normally a member of my family would have come to be with me and help me organise myself in a new situation). Of course, I have talked to family, friends and neighbours and have been very well supported. However, the lack of my regular contacts where I could talk face to face, maybe have a cup of tea or distract myself with a shared activity has been very debilitating.

Although I have used phone calls, Skype and Zoom to join up with people, and chatted on the doorstep, and this is very nice, it does not replace the real communication of meeting. I have tried to use music, radio and television to ease the loneliness, and they are of course, a help but not the same. Many people are worse off than me, but it has been and still is an extremely lonely challenging time.

A regular routine has been advised for us all, and should help one’s stability, but the tedious round of daily routine can become self-defeating.  Although I long for life to return to some more normal pattern, I also worry that I will have lost the confidence to communicate easily with other people.

I’m a 76-year-old woman living in London.

2.

Before the pandemic, I felt lonely whenever I was alone and unoccupied for a few hours. I had a childish fear of being alone with my own thoughts and not having anything to distract myself. Since the lockdown, I’ve had to spend a lot more time alone, of course, and I’ve been surprised to find that I’m okay. After an initial flurry of contact from friends who were worried about how I’d be coping (I have a reputation for being extremely sociable!) I have settled into a calmer life.

Now, solitude has become more of a physical issue. I have virtual contact at work and with friends, so I don’t feel particularly isolated. But I envy characters on TV who can touch, I hug my friends in my dreams at night, and I find myself suddenly desolate after joyful video calls because I cannot sit next to my friend on a sofa in a pub.

I’m a 29-year-old woman.

3.

Solitude meant (and still to an extent means) the sense of being apart. I am almost never literally alone – I live, work and holiday in cities, and it is rare to be out of earshot of someone else entirely. But those lives are not intersecting with mine. Before COVID, I often dreaded long weekends, 3 days in which I might not have a conversation with anyone else. I’d restart the working week disoriented to interaction with others.

COVID has strangely made this easier: I’m no longer the only person who has experienced being alone within almost-touching distance of others.

I used to feel that my (pretty regular and positive) online engagements didn’t really count, whereas now almost everyone has come to value distant interaction. There has been more of it, for me – more people have noticed that I am alone, and worried about it, rather than assuming I am doing it by choice.

It has been interesting to contrast my negative feelings about isolation before the lockdown or on bad days in lockdown with a friend who likewise lives alone and had a very busy life before COVID, but who is perfectly unmoved by lockdown and doing fine, not missing anyone. I don’t have that mindset – I do miss people.

I’ve been in a long-term long-distance relationship for many years; it’s not perfect, but good when we see one another. So solitude in lockdown meant knowing we simply couldn’t meet for months. In one way, we’re very good at communicating at a distance. In another way, it was a dramatic, forcible separation.

He’d given me a stuffed animal a few months earlier (most uncharacteristic for both of us, really a joke impulse buy) and for the early weeks of lockdown it became a totem of his presence with me, which both of us referred to as comforting. I’m glad to say that has worn off a bit as lockdown has got more familiar and less stringent; I’m not talking to stuffed animals any more.

I’m 45 and live in London.

4.

Solitude before COVID seemed more peaceful and relaxing. Now it seems like the worst thing in the world as it is not through choice any more. I live alone so I have never had a problem with being alone but knowing I have to stay alone makes it worse. I think being in solitude through choice was okay because if I decided I wanted to see others and spend time with people, I could do so. Now I don’t like not knowing when I can next have be people over, or go and see friends and family. I feel more lonely now knowing that the other people I know aren’t in lockdown alone. I don’t know anybody else who is currently alone.

I used to have my work routine so would spend all day talking to people but now I can only speak to people over the phone or at a distance in their garden.

I’m 25-years-old and live alone in an apartment.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post ‘Within Almost-Touching Distance’: Solitude and Physical Isolation appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.