One is the loneliest number
And solitude is the seed of creativity
The year that I turned thirteen was one of the loneliest years of my life. This was the period that my parents decided to pack up our two-bedroom flat and move their three children 13 miles north (20 kilometers) from Little Haiti to Miami Gardens. Obscuring the fact that this was one of the many undemocratic acts my parents committed during my childhood (yes I loathed authoritarian regimes then and now), the new atmosphere conjured up novel forms of silence that I had never known. The trailing tones of honking cars, superimposing hip hop bass drops from people’s sound systems in my former neighborhood, felt like distant history. And my inability then and now, to make friends with the people in Miami Gardens confirmed how destructive my awkward character was in new and unfamiliar communities. But more than anything, this new neighborhood felt like a weigh station to commit basic acts: we ate, we watched television, and we slept.
Neither my parents nor I conducted our work or schooling in the new neighborhood, especially given that these spaces were 15 miles (24 kilometers) away. My high school was in Coral Gables, my father worked in a factory in Liberty City, and my mother worked in a public hospital in Overtown. (Note: Our previous home in Little Haiti was closer to all three locations.)
Loneliness stirs up confusion and discord when adolescents are still trying to unearth who they are. When unaddressed, that loneliness can preoccupy every moment of a young person’s mind, by shattering one’s confidence or even making one feel that a home can fly away like a loose leaf in the wind. But then, at that tender and ambitious age, I did a propulsive act. I turned the 4-m2 laundry into my reading room (think contemporary home office). For three years, this is where I worked on my SATs, read Charles Baudelaire, and escaped from my younger siblings. The laundry room transformed my loneliness into the transcendent colorless sky. The move forced me to forfeit my assumptions about loneliness and construct a sanctuary in a place that I had grown to detest.
In a review in The New Yorker writer Zoë Heller dissects Noreena Hertz's "The Lonely Century". Heller writes:
Many books about the atrophy of our associational ties and the perils of social isolation have been published in recent years, but we continue to underestimate the problem of loneliness, according to Hertz, because we define loneliness too narrowly.
Not only is there a literary and cultural trend to unpack the factors that make modern society lonely, but people are wondering if the pillars of capitalism–hyper-exploitation, environmental crisis, and political alienation–might fuel the perilous state of loneliness. The loneliness “crisis” might not be as harmful as people purport. A 2019 study strongly suggests that women are happier without children and a spouse so the "lonely" theory might not be so neat. But single women are not the only ones who prefer their solitude, various mammals also find solace when they are alone.
Rather than be engulfed in the company of another bear, most bears prefer social isolation, whether it is the polar bear balancing itself on the edge of a patch of ice or the Grizzly bear scaling an evergreen green, bears are keen to travel alone, rather than in pacts. The 52 Hertz whale, often referred to as one of the loneliest whales in the world, spends the majority of their lives on its own in one of the most expensive environments in the world–the oceans. Of the nine million species we know about, most of them exist in this world, seldom coming into contact with others of their kind. Of course, humans are social creatures and we should appreciate what social gatherings can bring. But are these encounters more of a distraction than a source of inspiration?
Some writers find insight and beauty in reclusiveness. Virginia Woolf remains one of the most insightful and thorough novelists and writers who crafted a brilliant essay on what it means to be sick, “On Being Ill,” and an enigmatic novel that uses a dinner party to unveil the psychological damage of war, Mrs Dalloway. Woolf was a master of solitude and once opined, “In solitude, we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.” For Woolf, loneliness is inseparable from self-reflection. She has not been alone. The poet Adrienne Rich remarked that: “The impulse to create begins — often terribly and fearfully — in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence.” Here, Rich illustrates that poetry is born from silence.
As oracles of society, novelists and poets give us a lionhearted image of the world, through terse renditions of the self, by offering us a raw documentary of our states of being and the things that shape who we are. People overcome loneliness by constructing community, listening to nature, or curating a future that transcends suffering. Loneliness is about resilience and survival, about constructing one’s life, even if there are devastating and disruptive ruptures. But even in the face of these confrontations, we can radically shift our spirit and traverse the pain that emerges from being all alone.
On a Personal Note
I will be a Visiting Fellow between now and early June at the University of Oslo. During that time, I will write and workshop several chapters of my book manuscript, Captive Contagions (the title is subject to change), and read epidemics-related archival documents and secondary texts. My book is under contract with One Signal/Simon & Schuster Press, so I will have less of an online presence with the exception of this digitally visible weekly newsletter. When I’m motivated, I’ll provide a cultural critical cold take on Twitter.
Reading Recommendations
Nichole Chung, Grieving His Mother's Death, Ocean Vuong Learned to Write for Himself
Kesewa John, Interview with Annette Joseph-Gabriel on Black Women, Frenchness, and Decolonization
Ben Miller, Germany Reckons With Wagner: Cultural Jewel, or National Shame?
Siddhartha Mukherjee, Emperor of all Maladies
Yasmina Price, Unfinished Stories: A Conversation with Rosine Mbakam
Soaking in the beauty of Norwegian solitude,