Henry David Thoreau, in Walden, praises not only self-reliance and a certain practical ingenuity, but also solitude. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude”, he says, and he continues:
A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. [...] The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but he must be where he can “see the folks”, and recreate, and he thinks remunerate, himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realise that the student, though in the house, is still in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.
By this description, manual worker and student alike experience solitude during their working lives and try to make up for that by being social in their leisure time. (Note how the rules re punctuation have changed since Walden was first published in 1854 – commas were used much more widely then. Just an observation.) I think on the whole this is an accurate description. Most of us only get to see their loved ones in the evening and are relatively unconnected to co-workers – and thus in our own solitary little cocoon – during the day.
This is precisely where mountaineering always feels a bit strange. Most people I know go to the mountains to seek out solitude, even though they already have so much of it at work. Isn’t that a bit strange? I walked all by myself for many hours yesterday; the other walkers in the party had dispersed but even when we were still walking together everyone was wrapped in their own cocoon of silence. I don’t want to say anything clichéd like ‘walking along silently, I became one with my surroundings’, even though that would be true. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? But I find that intially at least, just like with Thoreau’s farmer who comes home and cannot stand to be alone with his thoughts, solitude is quite difficult to bear.
Generally speaking, solitude is something that is tolerated, but not enjoyed. It is the contextual condition of some sort of activity, such as work, but it isn’t anything to strive for in itself. Sitting somewhere all alone, and maybe even thinking about life in that situation, or else just doing some thinking – unthinkable! Only morbid people and philosophers would do that. I think we have something like a cultural imperative to be active at all times and not too reflective, unless, again, reflection is our job. There has to be a point to the things that we do, and sitting in solitude and not doing anything – because thinking doesn’t mean ‘doing’ – is ultimately pointless, or so it may seem.
The same can be said about our leisure pursuits in general: They have to involve activity, and most of them actually require the presence of other people, too. Being busy is a moral good, being lazy and physically inactive is sinful. This may be a crude generalisation but I think it’s not too far off either. Thoreau didn’t have to worry about any of these things; the activity hype started way after his time, and being part of a vibrant intellectual movement he wasn’t the only one to praise solitude. Other transcendentalists called for it, in fact, as did the German Romantics, because one could only find oneself, or one’s self, in the confrontation with solitude.
Imagine, then, that you’re high up in the mountains, about 2 hours away from the hut which is also in the mountains, meaning: You’re really in the midst of the mountains. All of a sudden the direction of the wind changes, the wind speed increases markedly, the clouds get dark and menacing. Because you planned to climb up 400 meters to reach the top of a mountain at around 1.000 m and because the wind speeds up there would blow you right off the hill and into the glen, you decide to seek shelter and wait out to see if the weather improves again. You find a few big rocks, you nestle in them, put on extra layers, pull the hood deep down, and wait.
Knees pulled up to your chin, hands in gloves, backpack close by – huddled up you sit there and look out into the mountains. And wait. The clouds are pushing each other over the mountains tops, eager to fling themselves down into the glen one after the other, and from where you’re sitting it looks like a waterfall of clouds. That’s how fast the wind drives the air. It is soooooo loud around you that even though you’re there all by yourself it is far from silent. The hills are roaring. Then comes the rain, the driving rain. Still you sit there looking out from underneath your hood, still hoping that it might only be a passing shower. But how long can you wait like this?
40 minutes fly by, 40 minutes of only sitting and looking and thinking. 40 minutes of enforced solitude. Would anyone seek this out? Being alone in the mountains, sitting there and looking out? I don’t think so. ‘The mountains aren’t there to be looked at’, someone is bound to point out. ‘You have to experience them’, meaning ‘you have to actively experience them’, of course, like ‘you have to be doing something’. Sitting in the midst of a storm is a good experience, I would counter. But then so is simply sitting there, as well. Perhaps mountaineers are the least likely to ever do that because they’re actually fit enough to run up and down mountains all day long. But I was grateful for the enforced solitude in the shelter, and also for the solitary hours the day after.
Did I find myself though in the way that Thoreau & Emerson and Goethe & Schiller envisaged the experience of nature? I don’t know. Having all my thoughts to myself and being able to do what I want I probably followed my own inclinations a bit more in terms of what features in the landscape I focused on and what I subsequently thought about them. I also took time to take pictures where I would normally try to keep up with the group. I walked at my own pace, too, which is very important. I played with a tadpole in a puddle for a while. I even wanted to sit around lazily for a little bit, simply because I could, but midges prevented that.
I altogether came out of it the same person but with a new kind of experience of myself. I think that’s what solitude did for Thoreau too, and what it can do for anybody.
