“The End of Solitude” by William Deresiewicz begins with the question, “What does the contemporary self want?” He answers after two sentences: “Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants . . . great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.”
The art of solitude may be lost.
And what a loss. Marilynn Robinson (an author whose writing I would compare to eating dessert for every meal) is quoted various times in this article as relating solitude to reading, where in pre-postmodernism, “The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass.” Deresiewicz continues, “With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice became available to, even incumbent upon, everyone,” which is “not reading as Marilynne Robinson described it”: so restorative, nourishing, and essential.
