Embracing the Joys of Solitude in the New Year

One of my most cherished memories from elementary school is visiting the Hermit’s Grave, a local historical landmark in our small town in New York State. My fourth-grade class trooped through the woods and used wax paper to rub the recluse Johann Wilhelm Stolting’s tombstone. Stolting — also known as the Hermit of Irvington or the Hermit of Ardsley — was an eccentric 19th-century German immigrant who slept in a coffin, spoke seven languages and supported himself by selling homemade buttons.

He lived until he was nearly 80, and even though a New York Times article from 1885 makes him sound like an absolute crank, he was also admired by the local villagers. “The people say that Stolting is a shrewd old fellow in managing his peculiar affairs in his peculiar way. He hates the city, and glories in the independence of his lonesome existence in the country.”

The Hermit has stayed with me because I found him aspirational — I know this was probably weird for a fourth grader, but stay with me. He was living his best, solitary life in his little wooded hut with his little coffin bed.

I still think about him once a month or so, because a small part of me craves my own modern version of that extreme solitude. I probably couldn’t be as physically isolated, nor would I want it to be — I hate nature, so living in the woods would be tough. But what I’m searching for is time alone, in my own head and in interior space, removed from other people’s thoughts and wants. And I worry that we’ve become a culture that is too fixated on the idea of loneliness as something intolerable and often negative.

In a prescient 2009 essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz described the way in which the immediate and far-flung social connectivity that the internet enabled created a generation that “lost the ability to be alone, their capacity for solitude” — and he believed that “The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.”

Just as I have questioned the hyper-focus and tracking of happiness, I wonder if some of us would be better off embracing loneliness as a normal feeling that we all experience from time to time, rather than necessarily being pathological. I am particularly disturbed by the potential medicalization of loneliness, even though loneliness does not really have any kind of explicit diagnosis attached to it.