Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude

178 Pages·2018·1.6 MB·English

by  Stephanie Rosenbloom

VIKING
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Copyright © 2018 by Stephanie Rosenbloom
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Excerpt from “The Morning Wind” from The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (Harper San Francisco, 1995). Used by
permission of Coleman Barks.
Excerpt from “my secret life” from Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way: New Poems by Charles Bukowski,
edited by John Martin. Copyright © 2003 by Linda Bee Bukowski. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publisher.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Rosenbloom, Stephanie, author.
Title: Alone time : four seasons, four cities, and the pleasures of solitude / Stephanie Rosenbloom.
Description: New York, New York : Viking, [2018] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011925 (print) | LCCN 2018015035 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399562310 (ebook) | ISBN 9780399562303
(hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Travelers—Psychology. | Solitude. | Rosenbloom, Stephanie—Travel. | BISAC: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT /
Inspiration & Personal Growth. | TRAVEL Essays & Travelogues. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY Personal Memoirs.
Classification: LCC G155.A1 (ebook) | LCC G155.A1 R625 2018 (print) | DDC 910.401/9—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011925
Version_1
For Daniel
&
my parents
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Witches and Shamans
Spring: Paris
PART I:
FOOD
Café et Pluie ~ Coffee and Rain—The Science of Savoring
La Vie est Trop Courte Pour Boire du Mauvais Vin ~ Life Is Too Short to Drink
Bad Wine—On Eating Alone
A Picnic for One in the Luxembourg Gardens—Alternatives to the Table
Of Oysters and Chablis—Servings of Delight and Disappointment
BEAUTY
Musée de la Vie Romantique—How to Be Alone in a Museum
Window-Licking—Finding Your Muse
Summer: Istanbul
PART II:
NERVE
Üsküdar—The Art of Anticipation
The Hamam—The Importance of Trying New Things
Call to Prayer—Learning to Listen
LOSS
The Rainbow Stairs of Beyoğlu—Appreciation
Before It’s Gone—Ephemeralities
Fall: Florence
PART III:
SILENCE
Arrows and Angels—Games for One
Alone with Venus—On Seeing
KNOWLEDGE
The Secret Corridor—Schooling Yourself
Winter: New York
PART IV:
HOME
The City—On Assignment
Sanctuaries and Strangers—Designing Home
Ode to the West Village
Tips and Tools for Going It Alone
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Introduction: Witches and Shamans
Paris; June. The taxi rolled to a stop in front of 22 rue de la Parcheminerie. It
was Saturday morning, before the café chairs were put out, before visitors
began arriving at the old church, before check-in time at the little hotel with its
window boxes of red geraniums.
Cigarette butts and red petals were scattered across the sidewalk.
I was alone with a suitcase and a reservation. And days to live however I
chose.
The average adult spends about one-third of his or her waking time
alone.
—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
How are you spending yours? Scrolling Facebook? Texting? Tweeting? Online
shopping? The to-do list is endless.
But time isn’t.
Alone time is an invitation, a chance to do the things you’ve longed to do.
You can read, code, paint, meditate, practice a language, or go for a stroll.
Alone, you can pick through sidewalk crates of used books without worrying
you’re hijacking your companion’s afternoon or being judged for your lousy
idea of a good time. You need not carry on polite conversation. You can go to a
park. You can go to Paris.
You’d hardly be alone. From North America to South Korea more people are
now living by themselves than ever before. Single-person households are
projected to be the fastest-growing household profile globally from today to
2030. More people are dining solo. More are traveling alone—a lot more. From
vacation rental companies to luxury tour operators, industry groups have been
reporting double-digit upticks in solo travel. Airbnb is seeing more solo travelers
than ever. Intrepid Travel reports that half of its guests—some seventy-five
thousand people a year—are now traveling by themselves, leading the company
to create its very first solos only tours. And the boom isn’t being driven just by
people who are single: The “married-with-kids” solo traveler market is growing
as well. Nearly 10 percent of American travelers with partners and children are
taking solo vacations during the year, according to one of the world’s largest
travel marketing organizations, MMGY Global. In other words, traveling alone
isn’t just for twentysomethings and retirees, but for anyone who wants it, at any
age, in any situation: partners, parents, and singles looking for romance—or not.
Few of us want to be recluses. The rise of coworking and coliving spaces
around the world is but the latest evidence of that. Yet having a little time to
ourselves, be it five days in Europe or five minutes in our backyard, can be
downright enviable.
Some 85 percent of adults—both men and women, across all age groups—
told the Pew Research Center that it’s important for them to be completely alone
sometimes. A survey by Euromonitor International found that people want more
time not only with their families, but also by themselves. And yet many of us,
even those who cherish alone time, are often reluctant to do certain things on our
own—which may lead us to miss out on entertaining, enriching, even life-
changing experiences and new relationships.
A series of studies published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that
men and women were likely to avoid enjoyable public activities like going to a
movie or restaurant if they had no one to accompany them. Any potential
pleasure and inspiration that might come from seeing a great film or an art show
was outweighed by their belief that going alone wouldn’t be as much fun, not to
mention their concerns about how they might be perceived by others.
Indeed, for many of us, solitude is something to be avoided, something
associated with problems like loneliness and depression. Freud observed that
“the first situation phobias of children are darkness and solitude.” In many
preliterate cultures, solitude was thought to be practically intolerable, as the
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote in Flow, his book about the science
of happiness: “Only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time by
themselves.”
Perhaps it’s not surprising that a series of studies published in the journal
Science in 2014 found that many participants preferred to administer an electric
shock to themselves rather than be left alone with their own thoughts for fifteen
minutes. Man, as scientists and philosophers from Aristotle on have noted, is a
social animal. And with good reason. Positive relationships are crucial to our
survival; to humanity’s collective knowledge, progress, and joy. One of the
longest studies of adult life in history, the Harvard Study of Adult Development,
has tracked hundreds of men for nearly eighty years, and the takeaway again and
again has been that good relationships—with family, friends, colleagues, and
people in our communities—make for happy, healthy lives.
Socially isolated people, on the other hand, are at an increased risk for disease
and cognitive decline. As Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard study,
has not so subtly put it: “Loneliness kills.” Christian hermits broke up their
solitary periods with communal work and worship. Thoreau had three chairs in
his house in the woods, “one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.”
Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto. Solitude and its perils is an ancient and
instructive story.
But it’s not the whole story. The company of others, while fundamental, is
not the only way of finding fulfillment in our lives.
For centuries people have been retreating into solitude—for spirituality,
creativity, reflection, renewal, and meaning. Buddhists and Christians entered
monasteries. Native Americans went up mountains and into valleys. Audrey
Hepburn took to her apartment. “I have to be alone very often,” she told Life
magazine in 1953. “I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until
Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
Others went great distances. Miles were sailed, flown, and driven by solo
adventurers like Captain Joshua Slocum and Anne-France Dautheville, one of
the first women to ride a motorcycle alone around the world. “From now on, my
life would be mine, my way,” she said of riding solo 12,500 miles in 1973.
Scholars have been insisting for decades that the positive aspects of solitude
deserve a closer look, from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott
in the 1950s to the British psychiatrist Anthony Storr in the 1980s, to
psychologists leading studies today. A little solitude, their research suggests, can
be good for us.
For one thing, time spent away from the influence of others allows us to
explore and define who we are. In private, we can think deeply and
independently, as the legal scholar and privacy expert Alan Westin explained.
There’s room for problem solving, experimentation, and imagination. The mind
can crackle with intense focus or go beachcombing, plucking up an idea like a
shell, examining and pocketing it, or letting it go to pick up another.
Thinkers, artists, and innovators from Tchaikovsky to Barack Obama, from
Delacroix and Marcel Marceau to Chrissie Hynde and Alice Walker, have
expressed the need for solitude. It’s what Rodin has in common with Amy
Schumer; what Michelangelo shares with Grace Jones. Philosophers and
scientists spent much of their lives in solitude, including Descartes, Nietzsche,
and Barbara McClintock, the Nobel Prize–winning geneticist who resisted
having a telephone until she was eighty-four. Countless writers, including
Shakespeare, Dickinson, Wharton, Hugo, and Huxley, mined solitude as a
theme. Symphonies and songs, poems and plays, and paintings and photos have
been created in solitude.
For the creative person, “his most significant moments are those in which he
attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and these moments are
chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone,” Storr wrote in his seminal
book, Solitude: A Return to the Self. While other people can be one of our
greatest sources of happiness, they can at times nonetheless be a distraction.
Their presence may also inhibit the creative process, “since creation is
embarrassing,” as the writer Isaac Asimov said. “For every new good idea you
have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not
care to display.” Monet slashed his paintings before the opening of an exhibition
in Paris, declaring the canvasses unworthy to pass on to posterity. Robert
Rauschenberg flung his early works into the Arno.
Yet just as alone time can be important for creation (and possible subsequent
destruction), it can also be necessary for restoration. Some of the latest research
has found that even fifteen minutes spent by ourselves, without electronic
devices or social interaction, can decrease the intensity of our feelings (be they
good or bad), leaving us more easygoing, less angry, and less worried. Studies
led by Thuy-vy Nguyen, published in the Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, suggest that we can use solitude or alone time as a tool, a way to
regulate our emotional states, “becoming quiet after excitement, calm after an
angry episode, or centered and peaceful when desired.”
Alone, we can power down. We’re “off stage,” as the sociologist Erving
Goffman put it, where we can doff the mask we wear in public and be ourselves.
We can be reflective. We have the opportunity for self-evaluation, a chance to
consider our actions and take what Westin called a “moral inventory.”
We can also take inventory of all the information that has accumulated
throughout the day. We can organize our “thoughts, reflect on past actions and
future plans, and prepare for future encounters,” as the psychologist Jerry M.
Burger wrote in the Journal of Research in Personality. Even Bill Clinton,
exemplar of extraversion, acknowledged that as president he scheduled “a
couple of hours a day alone to think, reflect, plan, or do nothing.” “Often,” he
said, “I slept less just to get the alone time.”
This notion of reflection harks back to an ancient Greek principle known as
epimelesthai sautou. The philosopher Michel Foucault translated it as “to take
care of yourself,” and though it was once “one of the main rules for social and
personal conduct and for the art of life,” Foucault observed that there is a