Alone Time Read online

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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

  PART I: Spring: Paris

  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

  PART II: Summer: Istanbul

  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

  PART III: Fall: Florence

  SILENCE

  Arrows and Angels—Games for One

  Alone with Venus—On Seeing

  KNOWLEDGE

  The Secret Corridor—Schooling Yourself

  PART IV: Winter: New York

  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 s
cientists 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 tendency, particularly in modern Western society, to view caring for oneself as almost immoral.

  And yet alone time has the potential to leave us more open and compassionate toward others. John D. Barbour, a professor of religion at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, has written that while solitude involves the self, it’s not necessarily narcissistic. He’s suggested that the solitude sought by biblical prophets helped shape their perspective and may have made them more sensitive to the suffering of people who were less powerful or outsiders. “Solitude at its best,” he wrote, is not about “escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it.”

  Unfortunately, there’s a tendency in our own age of scant nuance to conceive of solitude and society as either-or propositions: You’re either alone on your couch or you’re organizing dinner parties. That’s an unhelpful (and often wrong) distinction. The psychologist Abraham H. Maslow found that self-actualizing people—those who have attained the highest tier of his hierarchy of human needs—are capable of being more than one thing at one time, even if those things are contradictory. They can be simultaneously individual and social; selfish and unselfish. Burger wrote that people with a high preference for solitude don’t necessarily dislike social interaction, and aren’t necessarily introverted. They probably spend most of their time around others, and enjoy it; he said it’s simply that, relative to others, they more often chose to be by themselves because they appreciate the reflection, creativity, and renewal that solitude can offer.

  For years, the conventional wisdom was that if you spent a good deal of time alone, something was likely wrong with you. And, certainly, as psychologists have observed, many people do withdraw because they’re socially anxious or depressed. Yet many others choose to spend time alone because they find it pleasurable. Maslow, for example, said that mature, self-actualizing people are particularly drawn to privacy, detachment, and meditativeness.

  Indeed, one of the keys to enjoying alone time appears to be whether or not it’s voluntary. Additional factors, like what people think about when they’re alone, their age, and whether the time alone is temporary, may also play a role, but choice—taking some time to yourself because it’s what you desire, and not because you’ve been abandoned by your social network or have no other option—seems to be crucial. It can be the difference between a positive experience of sol
itude and excessive loneliness.

  How much time alone feels right, however, is a matter of taste and circumstance. For some, time alone is a rare privilege; something desired but hard to get between long work hours and a full house. Others may feel they spend too much time by themselves. Finding a balance that feels good is personal, and not necessarily easy.

  In the months before he became engaged, Charles Darwin, who famously wrote about man’s dislike of solitude and yet also prized his own solitary hours, created two columns in his journal headed “Marry” and “Not Marry.” Under reasons to “Not Marry” he included “freedom to go where one liked”; “Loss of time”; and “cannot read in the Evenings.” He continued on the following page: “I never should know French,—or see the Continent—or go to America, or go up in a Balloon, or take solitary trip in Wales.”

  But marriage, with its promise of companionship and children, prevailed. In a letter to his future wife, Emma, before their wedding day, Darwin told her that up to that point, he had rested his “notions of happiness on quietness & a good deal of solitude.” However, he believed that with Emma, he might find happiness beyond “accumulating facts in silence & solitude.” And for forty-three years, it seems he did.

  At Down House, the Darwin home in rural Kent county outside London, he lazed on the grass with his children under lime trees, listened to family letters read aloud in the drawing room, and played backgammon with Emma. Still, he carved out alone time, retreating to his study for up to six hours a day. Outdoors, between what his granddaughter Gwen Raverat described as “two great lonely meadows,” he built “the Sandwalk,” a quarter-mile path around a wood that he walked almost daily, even circling it multiple times, while trying to solve a problem. It was in his study and on this “thinking path,” as Darwin called it, amid old gnarled trees, bumblebees, and birds’ nests, that he conducted experiments and wrote On the Origin of Species.

  While Charles Darwin was in England strolling beneath tree boughs, another Charles—Baudelaire—was in Paris, writing about solitary journeys of a different sort.