He is speaking about what he calls awareness, by which he means the capacity of the individual fully to appreciate what is around him, his circumstances, his opportunities, and his thinking on himself, others, and the meaning of life. He is right, we hardly do this anymore.
The chapter begins by debunking the claim that solitude and silence are always regrettable. He sees solitude as the natural state, the best position in which a person can be in order to discover himself fully. He has a long screed about the complications, noises, and pointless busyness of modern life—in 1973!
Imagine if he could see today. Our phones never stop demanding our attention. We can hardly sit for drinks with friends and not have them bleeping, buzzing, and musicalizing constantly.
Here is something I just despise. I’ll be having a conversation with friends. Someone asks a question like: when did the religious wars end? Someone grabs a phone and starts talking into it, and the answer comes instantly. We sit there all feeling stupid and strangely defeated. We are not happy to have the answer. We are sad that the flow was interrupted by a stupid piece of technology.
A friend of mine was very strict about this. He insisted on banning all phones in any setting where friends are talking: living rooms, dining halls, restaurants, or even on the street standing around in a circle. He hated them. Anyone who took out a phone in his presence got a ferocious earful.
I used to think he went too far. Maybe not. Maybe we all need to shape up. Do you check your phone at night? I admit that I do sometimes. I always regret it. It serves no point. Turn it off. There is no downside.
To Sloane’s point, we surround ourselves with all this racket and interruption because we are afraid of ourselves and our solitude. We have fake friends, fake communities, fake urgencies, fake surprises, fake entertainments, fake everything. We seek to fill our lives with a nonstop stream of dopamine hits that only make us sad in the long run.
Sloane says he spent several weeks in solitude at a Vermont farmhouse, sitting by the fire, reading by candlelight, cooking his own food, listening to no music and having no guests. He described the feeling as fundamentally disorienting but in a good way. Ultimately, he says, it reset his entire mindset and life. He always looks back on those days as the ideal and tries to recreate them in his head.
Years ago, a priest invited me to a private retreat. I would live in a small room with no decorations. I would pray alone and with the community. I would eat in silence. I would not talk. I would only reflect.
As he described this, my answer came quickly: absolutely not. That sounds utterly terrible to me and I could never do it. I never looked back. But sometimes I wonder if I should have said yes. What precisely did I fear so much about solitude? What did I fear that I would find out about myself?
Aloneness goes with awareness. I’m more convinced than ever that there is no such thing as learning in a classroom or in a mass setting. All education is ultimately self-education, even if it can be hopefully directed by others. What we know, we learn by our own decisions, by discovering connections in our complicated minds, putting things together in ways that only happen in the solitary state of our own thought processes, uninterrupted.
The greatest blessing of my life came when my father rescued me from classes at a huge state university for which I was paying the bills with two jobs. My life was a mess, not because of partying or time wasting but because I never stopped doing things to survive. He found me a scholarship at a small liberal arts program and let me live in his house to reduce the financial burden.
I attended my classes with just 6-15 people and headed straight to the library. That was my home. I did reading for the classes and then went deeper. I read books in the footnotes, Then I read the books next to the books in the stakes (the elimination of library stacks is a tragedy). I got faster and faster and ever more curious about every topic imaginable.
At some point, I began to see the library as an impossible world of infinite adventure, offering an infinity of thrills in book after book and page after page. I would gather 20 books around me and start reading and taking notes furiously, sticking with it until the library closed at 11pm each day. My eyes became so bloodshot that I got addicted to eye drops.
Never did I stop to think this was weird. I was falling in love with learning, with discovery, with ideas and the life of the mind. I was in a state of absolute solitude, a position of hyper-awareness. Nearly everything I know today came from those two years of deep embed. It was awareness. It changed me forever.
More precisely, I would say that most of what I think now has a foundation in those years. I’m surprised at how much I draw from that experience. I truly wish everyone could have that. Sadly no one ever will, unless you really do make your way to a monastery for years of study. They will probably be the last truly educated people on Earth.
In the end, we are alone. That is okay. That is good. It is an opportunity to be aware, to grow, to mature, to connect with ourselves and whatever lives in the eternal spaces of our imaginations. In solitude we find faith. In solitude we find truth. In solitude we find peace.
We lack all three in our times, and we have built the world this way. We have done this to prevent ourselves from finding out the truth about ourselves. This is tragic, and yet we will keep doing it even though our current path leaves us more lonely than ever.
Interestingly, Sloane stopped his book there until a friend said that he seemed to end on a hopeless note. So he wrote a last reflection simply called Hope. Does it exist? Yes, of course it does. In his view, the path to hope is found through reflection on the virtues of the American experience and the attempt to apply them in our times.
Honestly, today I feel much more hopeful than he must have felt in 1973. We have seen how the people can rise up and make change happen. We observe new interest in the founding documents, the American spirit, the truth about our lives, our liberties, and what must be done to recapture what we have lost.
The 250th anniversary of our founding is a great marker. Let’s treat it as an inspiration to improve and repair our lives and our country, as a model for the world that it has always been.
