《william deresiewicz “the end of solitude》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《william deresiewicz “the end of solitude（12页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、William Deresiewicz: The End of SolitudeWhat does the contemporary self want? The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the two technologies converge - broadband tipping the Web from text to image, social-networking sites spreading the mesh
2、 of interconnection ever wider - the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known. This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, the
3、n to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves - by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in
4、 modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone. Though I shouldnt say
5、taking away. We are doing this to ourselves; we are discarding these riches as fast as we can. I was told by one of her older relatives that a teenager I know had sent 3,000 text messages one recent month. Thats 100 a day, or about one every 10 waking minutes, morning, noon, and night, weekdays and
6、weekends, class time, lunch time, homework time, and toothbrushing time. So on average, shes never alone for more than 10 minutes at once. Which means, shes never alone.I once asked my students about the place that solitude has in their lives. One of them admitted that she finds the prospect of bein
7、g alone so unsettling that shell sit with a friend even when she has a paper to write. Another said, why would anyone want to be alone?To that remarkable question, history offers a number of answers. Man may be a social animal, but solitude has traditionally been a societal value. In particular, the
8、 act of being alone has been understood as an essential dimension of religious experience, albeit one restricted to a self-selected few. Through the solitude of rare spirits, the collective renews its relationship with divinity. The prophet and the hermit, the sadhu and the yogi, pursue their vision
9、 quests, invite their trances, in desert or forest or cave. For the still, small voice speaks only in silence. Social life is a bustle of petty concerns, a jostle of quotidian interests, and religious institutions are no exception. You cannot hear God when people are chattering at you, and the divin
10、e word, their pretensions notwithstanding, demurs at descending on the monarch and the priest. Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm. (Egregious, for no man is a prophet in his own land. Tiresias was reviled before he
11、 was vindicated, Teresa interrogated before she was canonized.) Religious solitude is a kind of self-correcting social mechanism, a way of burning out the underbrush of moral habit and spiritual custom. The seer returns with new tablets or new dances, his face bright with the old truth.Like other re
12、ligious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism. In Marilynne Robinsons interpretation, Calvinism created the modern self by focusing the soul inward, leaving it to encounter God, like a prophet of old, in profound isolation. To her enumeration of Calvin,
13、Marguerite de Navarre, and Milton as pioneering early-modern selves we can add Montaigne, Hamlet, and even Don Quixote. The last figure alerts us to readings essential role in this transformation, the printing press serving an analogous function in the 16th and subsequent centuries to that of televi
14、sion and the Internet in our own. Reading, as Robinson puts it, is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity. The soul encountered itself in response to a text, first Genesis or Matthew and then Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass. With Protestantism and printing, the quest for the divine voice becam
15、e available to, even incumbent upon, everyone.But it is with Romanticism that solitude achieved its greatest cultural salience, becoming both literal and literary. Protestant solitude is still only figurative. Rousseau and Wordsworth made it physical. The self was now encountered not in God but in N
16、ature, and to encounter Nature one had to go to it. And go to it with a special sensibility: The poet displaced the saint as social seer and cultural model. But because Romanticism also inherited the 18th-century idea of social sympathy, Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability - if less for Rousseau and still less for Thoreau, the most famous solitary of all, then certainly for Wordsworth, Melville, Whitman, and many others. For Emerson,
