Golgonooza

Shortly after leaving university, I went to live in an experimental Christian community that was a mite dysfunctional. In my bewilderment, I was downloading at Donald Reeves, then Rector of St. James' Picadilly who suggested there were two forms a successful religious community could take. The first was to be rooted in a clear set of rules, a sanctioned hierarchy, and an evolving tradition. His example of such a community was a Benedictine monastery (in which, in passing, Thomas Merton thought the only place in which one could practice communism). The second type was where the processes of life were a continuing negotiation rooted in shared practices of dialogue that allowed for a flatter structure and enabled frissons to be (endlessly) negotiated. His example of such a community was the then relatively newly formed Findhorn in Scotland. Do not, he suggested, fall between these two stools - as evidently where I was living did! I was reminded of this sage advice when reading Anna Ne...

  In your thirties, your lover dies (in a hospital in Paris of AIDS, as it happens) and you are tipped into the loneliness of grief. As time proceeds (and as the culture mostly expects), this 'ought' to move into the discovery of a new relationship. Is not coupling what life requires for fruitful happiness - even if, as here, being gay, it is bent out of shape of what the mainstream expected (expects). Yet, it does not happen, time appears to pass, no one emerges and indeed you discover that you rest content not in loneliness but in a shaping solitude in which the wells of your creativity dwells.  Why do we assume that solitude = loneliness? Why do we, as a culture spend so much time seeking to avoid it, when, in truth, if we look about us, we can multiply exemplars to its fruitfulness in shaping meaningful lives and witnesses to beauty?  Fenton Johnson's 'At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life' is an exploration rooted in this his own experienc...