Solitude

Art by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

I was thinking about my grandma the other day, about how she used to leave her TV on all the time, whether she was in the room or not. When I was in college, I had a standing invitation to come to her house for dinner. I’d arrive in the early afternoon, and she’d have pork chops, applesauce, baked potatoes, two vegetables, and dessert all laid out for me. Then, two hours later, while I was lying recumbent on the sofa with a beer in my hand, I would hear her call out, “Geoffrey! Suppertime!” She was something else—a great lady and tough as nails.

Since her husband—my grandpa—had died, she’d lived alone in her little house in what had become a bad neighborhood. She said the TV—no matter what was on—kept her company. I’ve lived alone a few times in my life, never for very long, but it was never really a solitary existence. I was young. Friends and acquaintances would visit me, or I’d be going places myself. It was hard to be alone.

Now, as I find myself growing older and facing the possibility of limited mobility and—so mortality goes—fewer friends, I wonder about facing solitude. Sometimes—more recently lately—I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep. In the wee hours, especially around four a.m. or so, except for the stray car going by, there is virtually no noise. The silence is as large and dark as a bottomless well, as limitless as an ocean horizon, and yet close enough to touch. 

Lying there in that quiet, my thoughts inevitably turn away from the trivial worries of tomorrow’s workday, errands to be run, or the meals to be cooked. The silence swallows up those little thoughts. Instead, I think about lost friends, missed chances, or stupid mistakes. I think about what I should be doing, what I should have done, or what I should do next. I worry, and then I think it probably would be better to have a TV playing in the background—just to keep me company. 

But at the same time, there is a weird sort of comfort in a nighttime solitude. There is a freedom that’s hard to find in the bang-bang bustle of daily life, a freedom to let one’s thoughts roam. Sometimes lying in the darkness during my sleepless nights, I’ll remember people I haven’t seen for years or places I don’t really remember going to, maybe places that don’t exist. It’s hard to tell in the dark. 

But the people I remember are usually pleasant and the places—wherever they are—are always beautiful. But if solitude can take a mind to places that may never have existed and to people who long since passed, where else might it carry a body—or a soul? It might be better to have a TV on in the background. Just to keep me company.

Of course, solitude offers relief from the stress of personal relationships and social intercourse with strangers (who are getting stranger all the time). There is no shame, no rebukes, no embarrassment, humiliation, or contempt in solitude. On the other hand, neither is there companionship, collaboration, harmony, nor affirmation. The weird comfort of solitude, the safety of isolation, and the security of loneliness seem much safer than the vagaries of a hostile outside world.

One cold wintry and sleepless night, I lay thinking of Conrad Aiken’s short story, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” about a boy who slowly withdraws into a dream world of pristine newly fallen snow that deadens sound and covers up his ugly world, creating a beautiful new reality. In short, snow causes his eventual complete isolation from his family. The boy withdraws into his own mind. I wondered if that was an inevitable result of isolation. 

Then suddenly—out of nowhere—I remembered Dick Proenneke, who was featured in a PBS documentary Alone in the Wilderness. He was a self-taught naturalist who had decided to retire into the Alaskan wilderness where he built a cabin from scratch and lived alone for years—with only an occasional visitor from the outside world. Proenneke documented the process of building his cabin with only the materials at hand, including trees he harvested for the walls, stones from nearby for his fireplace, and gravel from the lakebed for his home’s foundation. He filmed every step of his process on 8mm film and took religious notes on his experiences and the fauna and flora from his environment. 

Here was a man who did not need to have the TV on in the background. He neither needed nor wanted company (or a TV in the background). Instead, he used his self-imposed solitude as a mirror to measure his own ingenuity, courage, and fortitude. 

People still leave TVs on in the background but that’s old school. This is the twenty-first century. Now people use their smartphones for background noise. They play games, they do hashtag challenges, and they take selfies to both ease and enhance their isolation. Gaming with someone you’ve never meet and who you never will meet is as safe as having an imaginary friend. Taking selfies or watching TikToks is better than any TV background noise. Neither one requires the least bit of thought, but they both will give you the illusion you’re not alone.

Solitude is a mirror. It reflects our worst fears or our best ambitions, our greatest desires and our worst regrets. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”