Introduction Solitudes

Abstract

This introductory essay gestures toward some of the ironies of solitude—and the places where those ironies become paradoxes, even promises—beginning with the grounding questions of this collection: What does it mean to speak of solitude together? How does one solitude speak to, or with, or for, another? Can our aloneness—note the irony of the first-person plural—ever be said to be shared? Can it be said at all? Medieval theologians, especially Gregory the Great, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Meister Eckhart, serve as guides in the wilderness here, alongside various voices from the history of North American popular music. Solitude, they show, is a richly mixed terrain, where we may get lost in our self-atomizing pride or, just as easily, open ourselves to the world’s (and the divine’s) endlessly unpredictable self-disclosure. To cultivate solitude is something like a game we play with the present and the past, with ourselves and one another. Being alone is complicated.