About The Philosophy of Isolation On Purpose
Post 497:
Not too long ago I watched a video about the proliferation of aspirant writers, and I’d like to say a few words. I agreed with a lot of it. It’s on the School of Life YouTube channel, where they make a ton of great stuff.
They give several big reasons for the turgid numbers of young and hungry authors, but loneliness seemed to take the cake, far as motivations go.
Makes sense. Their contention went something like this: If the need arises to put pen to paper, it’s probably resulting from the lack of someone to express yourself to. A friendly ear. Family. Fellowship and the like.
Words that were used to approximate the emotions that eventually culminate in a writer “or creator” doing their thing: despair, shame, flaky skin…
I added the flaky skin, but it felt appropriate.
They even added a quote from Flaubert. I’ll paraphrase. If he’d been getting some as a teenager, he never would’ve done something so dumb as become a writer.
Okay. I get it. If you’re rocking it out with the ladies, there’s no time or inclination to sit around like a schmuck and write things about things.
There’s something to this, but being the resident contrarian, I put it to myself to find a flurry to counter this barrage of jabs to the face.
Before I throw down, I have to acknowledge my boy Socrates. He never wrote a frigging thing. As the referenced video aptly points out, the Gadfly said that people needed to talk to one another. He’s pretty much my hero, so it’s hard to refute. On the other hand, if Plato hadn’t written down his thoughts, no one would know him from a hole in the wall. Whoa. That’s a mind-job. He talks about not writing, but someone had to write about not writing, otherwise… and… hopefully you get the point.
Now the part where I give it a shot. I’ll do this with a series of short statements so I don’t trip over my own shiz. Literature is storytelling. Storytelling, if history is any judge, is a good. Good storytelling is a craft honed by years of practice, except in the case of the outlying genius who starts blinking and downloads his skills from the great beyond.
Okay. How does one get good at anything? Time. Dare I say, practice. And unless it’s baseball or some other team activity, this takes some alone time. I doubt Einstein had his epiphanies while his buddies Gustav and Fred were wrestling next to him on the floor.
I could be wrong about that, but let’s assume he was alone.
It takes a little alone time to get good at anything. Whether it’s practice, visualization, reenactment, rethinking—solitude and isolation are big.
The examples are myriad. How about piloting. You have to solo to even be a pilot. That’s like… the point.
Far as the other hand, you need a life. By “life,” I mean peeps to hang out with, cultivate ideas, tell jokes, all the rest. You know—the stuff that counteracts all that “me” time.
Flaubert gets it only half right. Fairly sure I was in love at eighteen, but I still wanted to write an awesome song and sing it to a pretty girl. So alone time was crucial—I couldn’t practice my embarrassingly bad rendition of a Bryan Adams song in front of friends and family. That would’ve just been painful.
Conclusion: Despair-type isolation is no good. We need friends and family. We also need to get good at stuff. That’s where voluntary isolation comes in to play. And I think that’s okay. Though, I admit, everything’s subject to review. Cheers and see you after.
