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At The Center of All Beauty Solitude

 


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 experience of what solitude might mean to us if we attend and look.

The book anchors itself in two interwoven strands. The first is Lawson's memoir of his parents - both of whom lived two lives - one entwined in the care of one another, their children, and their local community (that included the monks at the nearby Abbey at Gethsemani in Kentucky whose most famous solitary was Thomas Merton). The second is of a cohort of creative witnesses to the solitary life including Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, and the fashion photographer, Bill Cunningham. 

Both are chosen to make a central point that you do not have to live on your own to perceive and practice the importance of solitude. It can be a fruitful and necessary dimension of any life, however, outwardly configured and signed. Lawson's father built a substantial hut in the woods both as a place of solitary retreat but also of welcoming fellowship; Lawson's mother tended the vegetable garden as work to support family and guests but tended orchids for her own happy delight. My own parents were happy to holiday alone as together - the one enriching the other by the space it created to be oneself as well as a couple, this aloneness of self, it seemed to me, a nurturing pre-condition of their happiness, not its negation.

Turning to his more famous exemplars, Lawson deftly sketches their lives, delineates how solitariness claimed them as a chosen destiny, more than as an act of fate, and what they made of it and from it. In each case, questioning why critics or biographers so often imagine that this solitude was a negative, a source of pain, out of which art stumbled as it were rather than a path that was embraced, celebrated, and from which beauty was born. People choosing to reverence and love the all, as wide as an embrace can go, rather than love with a particular one that might be (was) experienced by them as confinement. Dickinson, for example, need not be pitied, her life and work read aright is a paean of praise to her solitariness, her spinsterdom. Walt Whitman sought out comrades in abundance, celebrated the possibilities of friendships but skillfully eluded settling down in an exclusive relationship that he might see as exclusionary. 

None of this is offered as a negation of the settled, enfolded state with one's soul mate - the dance of long-lasting relationship and its fertility but as a 'turning of the stone' to what might lie on the other side; and, how both sides, multiple sides, offer satisfactory paths to fulfillment. We owe cultural debts to solitude - Christ in the wilderness, the Buddha slipping out from his wife and newborn child towards Enlightenment come to Lawson's mind as well as Dickinson's poems or Cezanne's paintings. Let us acknowledge and celebrate them and recognize their potential fragility in an age of busyness, noise, and our preoccupation with being seen (and together). 

They are wonderful reminders/discoveries on the way - the pleasure of solitary travel that makes you more vulnerable, attentive to what comes along, and, for me, one not mentioned, the pleasure of lunching alone yet at a restaurant free simply to enjoy the food, meandering at your own pace, take up the book I bought along or not, simply watching the world, configuring stories out of what one sees. 

Such solitariness might be a temporary haven, a periodic interlude in your life (and Lawson admits that his might conceivably end - the openness of his solitariness cannot deny its potential foreclosure), or a willed, settled decision that lasts a lifetime. However, configured let us celebrate its gifts.

For ultimately being able to be solitary, Lawson's suggests, has two profound consequences - outwardly an ability to reverence the world out of which creativity flows and which does not grasp after things - material or explanatory - but awaits offerings and inwardly in the words of Thomas Merton, solitariness offers: "My knowledge of myself in silence … which is beyond words and concepts because it is utterly particular … opens out into the silence of God." Solitariness brings you home into the world, uniquely you, nested in its giver.

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