I’m Not Saying Stop Reading My Blog, But…

BY ART TAYLOR, ART & LITERATURE

Yesterday, I came across a fascinating piece by William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle Review, the magazine insert of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “An End To Solitude” examines today’s technologies and the resultant connectedness granted us by cellphones, texting, Facebook, twitter, and blogs like the one you’re reading now, and then asks what’s happened to the idea of being alone with oneself: the value of meditation and rumination, of solitude as a place of reflection and renewal or as an incubator for the growth of wisdom. While many of us talk about how Facebook has changed the nature of what friendship means (sometimes talk on Facebook about it!) or how we all connect and relate, Deresiewicz offers a broader view, drawing on the vast history of man and sampling novelists, critics and philosophers — Socrates, Emerson and Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, Lionel Trilling, Marilynne Robinson — to examine what solitude has meant and what it means now. >>MORE