There has been a lot of concerned discussion in the press about the extent to which the current “lockdown” regime imposes solitude on different types of people. The centre of attention until recently has been the situation of the elderly who live alone, and there has been a lot of encouragement for us to check up on our neighbours who are in this situation. (My wife and I do some shopping each week for one such person, and she is in touch also with her sister, in a similar situation.) I have been thinking, however, about the different senses in which the term “solitude” might apply. After all, Wordsworth seems to have thought of it quite positively.
Solitude is not, of course, synonymous with loneliness. Like most artist, I presume, I find a degree of isolation to be absolutely necessary for artistic activity. We are generally typical of what Colin Wilson called “the outsider”, in his celebrated book of that title. A degree of detachment is a precondition for our ability to do what we do. Consequently we don’t just tolerate our separation from more sociable activity but we demand it, and seek it out.
Then there is the temporary isolation from company that most people seem to find refreshing in the middle of a busy life. This has a battery-charging function even for the most gregarious of people. The important thing about both of these categories, however, is that they can usually be terminated at will. The degree and duration of our solitude is under control.
When solitude is discussed as a problem in our society it is the involuntary separation of people from company that people have in mind. This is the region of “loneliness” we are encouraged to try to mitigate in the case of those who live alone, or who are ill or disabled. The degree of our concern is greater where the individuals concerned have no means of making a voluntary escape, even on a temporary basis. Recently our attention has been drawn to the fate of the residents of hospices, who face death alone. It is within our capacity to begin to place ourselves imaginatively in their situation and to grasp what that might mean, even where we are unsure how we might respond to it.
Recently, however, I encountered a solitude beyond this degree, and indeed beyond my ability to inhabit it. At the end of Philippe Sands’ book East West Street, on which I have commented on several occasions in this blog, the leading Nazi administrator in Poland, Hans Frank, is tried in the Nuremberg Tribunal, found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, and executed. As he faces death by hanging he is without any sympathetic support from the other defendants, separated from his family (some of whom were even happy to condemn him), and consigned to the company only of those who are commissioned with his violent death. Even the chaplain whom he requests to make the sign of the cross is unconvinced that this gesture actually means anything to him. In these moments his solitude was absolute, and beyond anything I can claim to have created in my imagination. This was the “degree zero” of solitude.