Posted by
Buster Foghorn on Thursday, February 19, 2009 3:25:00 PM
A thoughtful book, I recommend Fifty Days of Solitude. Alone at home during a period of self-imposed seclusion, Doris Grumbach offers a helpful meditation on the meaning of solitude, telling of her time weighing and considering a range of questions, her search for answers, and a report of lessons learned. Her solitude affords her time to delve into remembered ideas from art and a lifetime of reading. Quoting artists and authors, she conducts her own Socratic dialogues, following Bacon’s admonition for book readers that “some few are to be chewed and digested.”
Grumbach also explores her thoughts about friends and friendships; thoughts about loneliness versus solitude; about the crowding out of “white spaces” where much meaning is often missed; about the need for learning “to look hard at what she did not notice before and even harder at what is not there, at what Paul Valery called ‘the presence of absence.’”
There is an interesting insight about the role of solitude in life and her failure to appreciate it as a gift when young, recalling two brief periods when she lived alone. The author recognizes that opportunities for reflection are more difficult for her in the noisy city. She learns that solitude nourishes her energy and promotes creativity; her writing becomes more satisfying and more productive.
The day’s mail disrupts her routine. It invades her seclusion bringing reports of unwelcomed events in friend’s lives—illness, death, disgrace. These letters, with news clippings, from friends, take her away from her writing. She receives a particularly disquieting report about a much-admired friend and respected teacher who has been indicted. His disturbing fall leads her to think about a characteristic of American society: “too often achievement and recognition come early and too fast, leaving a long life of disappointment and decline.’”
Finally, as her self-imposed seclusion ends, she reaches some final thoughts about solitude:
If I have learned anything in these days, it is that the proper conditions for productive solitude are old age and the outside presence of a small portion of the beauty of the world. Given these, and the drive to explore and understand an inner territory, solitude can be an enlivening, even exhilarating experience.
Other Book Reviews By Buster:
Taking Retirement: A Packed Deck of Lessons -
Gaining Perspective about the War against Radical Islamism – Civilization And Its Enemies,