Essays

On Solitude We tend to treat solitude as a problem to be solved — a gap in the calendar that signals social failure. Yet history's most original thinkers often sought it deliberately. Solitude is not the absence of company; it is the presence of unmediated thought, undiluted by the need to perform for an audience. What we lose in constant connection, we may be losing in the capacity to sit, uncomfortably at first, with our own unfinished ideas.