Presentational writing requires lots of organizational time. I’m easily bored by old themes—like promoting a virtue of solitude—when I’m already somewhere else (thanks to the solitude). It’s like taking time to write about a stopover while still on a highly-desired adventure. I’m likely to compensate by writing emblematically, which may seem nonsensical to others (or some other kind of invalidity: egoistic, untenable,...), but is both a promissory note (albeit one which is definite only for me) and a private emblem of notes unused.

I’ve intended to dwell with solitude as a theme (derived from that “condition” which any good session of writing has), intended for so long that I have an array of notes of which I’m now tired. The inspiration of that is gone, marginalized by other inspirations’ array “awaiting” play into each other—interplay, mirrorplay—so much more interesting than the cumulation of solitudes that yielded the play-auraed array.

Ester Schaler Bucholz’s Call of Solitude: alonetime in a world of attachment, 1997, suggests, just by its title, important differences between being lonely (always unwelcomed) and potentials of being alone, between sociocentrism and being with oneself. 300 pages; 40 pp. of footnotes. What might I add to the issue? I want to have read it, yet I haven’t. But I’m drawn to the title like the outer prettiness of a presumably beautiful person (which is not about being pretty) that I don’t try to meet because I do know that the beauty I seek is already with me somehow, mirrored by the other’s appeal. The clinical professor’s book becomes an emblem for finding virtue in one’s ownmost time, inasmuch as one still has life. (She died, 2004).

And it’s an emblem for a syllabus, from Rousseau through Anthony Storr or Rebecca Solnit to Colin Thubron (none of whom I’ve read).

Earlier, I declared the origins of modern scholarship in monastic lives (very plausible). So, the emblem solitude gains an aura of history, a path in cultural evolution toward heights of inworldness (inwardness, inwordness) in the so-called West, beyond (I think) the premodern texts of the so-call East that remain nonetheless kindreds in our evolution of “mindfulness” and “Mind,” etc.

Where are we, chamber music of plural psychality? An aging mind draws into its internality, into intrinsic appeals complementing an arcadia of our Time—which easily becomes pretentious, you see, if not quite boring to recount.

So, so much for that now.

june 2, 2012

Yet, “Elations of solitude” was abundantly continued and completed, New Years Day, 2012.