Nicholas Higgins 06/05/2020

On Solitude and Creativity

‘How much better is silence; the coffee table, the cup’, Virginia Woolf

If you’re working from home, or even self-isolating at the moment, then maybe you can learn something from these painters and writers who thrived on solitude. Instead of fearing and avoiding it, they utilised it to arouse the imagination and activate their creativity.

Family, friends and society are the enemy of the author. Whilst this may seem glaringly anti-social, solitude of this sort has given birth to strikingly original works of literature. This does not just include this very article, composed alone in my own dingy study! The ideas in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphoses, or George Orwell’s 1984, challenged and broke down our preconceived notions of the world. For good, or ill.

These men went past the solitary nature of authorship, they sought it out as an attitude to life. Nietzsche declared, ‘I need solitude, which is to say, recovery, return to my self, the breath of a free, light, playful air’. Kafka advised the writer not even to leave the room: ‘remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet and still’. George Orwell finished his magnum opus in a hut on the Hebridean Island of Jura, living by his own words, ‘to write books you need only comfort and solitude’. Each harnesed solitude, in thought and place, to think as others had not before.

The painter is also a friend of his own company. Pablo Picasso’s grandson, Olivier Widmaier Picasso, recalled that, ‘once he was in his studio, he was alone and no one could really enter that space’. He elevated his painting to a sort of quasi-spiritual act, ‘when I enter the studio, I leave my body at the door the way the Moslems leave their shoes when they enter the mosque’. Picasso embraced solitude with arms wide open, ‘I only allow myself to go in there and paint’. 

Though he received extensive schooling, it was outside of the formality and convention of institutions that he broke new ground in Art History. Instead of a naturalistic rendering of the world, for the first time objects and landscapes were ‘analysed’ in terms of their formal shapes. Thus was his born his fiercely idiosyncratic style, ‘Cubism’. One only formed when he could calm the chattering voices of his contemporaries, and listen to his own. 

All these figures condensed universal human experiences: memories, emotions, being, pain, into words and paint. It was only when they were alone that their thoughts were awakened to all the contradictory facets of human nature. Or, as Nietzsche put it, to ‘the wretched glass capsule of the human individual’. Kafka, Orwell, Nietzsche and Picasso materialised these experiences so familiar to us all. Whilst most of us can’t, or are too afraid too, they sat with these feelings, examined them and brought them forth into reality.  

The lives of these figures are also a lesson in not being consumed by solitude. Connecting with others, being inspired by them, reading about them, and collaborating with them, nurtures creativity. Zarathustra, 1984 and Metamorphoses could not have existed had each author not assidusouly read the novels and works of their predecessors. They took to heart Pliny the Younger’s advice, ‘devote yourself to the study of letters so as to derive from it something totally your own’. Equally, Picasso would never have been set on the path to Cubism were it not for the works of Paul Cezanne and Henri Rousseau, or archaic and tribal art.

Coupled with personal experiences, they penned and painted their own original thoughts. 1984 was the culmination of Orwell’s hatred of totalitarianism, witnessed in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. Zarathustra and Metamorphoses were much the result of their own neglected childhoods. Picasso could never have painted Guernica were it not for his disgust at the slaughter of the Spanish Civil War. These individuals then, are a good reminder to temper solitude with its corollary, participation. This article for one, would never have materialised were it not for much reading and research, conversations with friends, and experiences of solitude in my own life.

It’s also worth highlighting that the meaning in a good book or painting is only completed when we interact with them. Reading Kafka’s Metamporhoses for example, reminds me of the times I’ve felt alienated and out of place. The novella tells the life of a traveling salesman who wakes to discover he has turned into a giant insect. His physical transformation isolates him completely, stripping him of his humanity in the eyes of his family. It’s the great joy of books and art that even in fictional, absurd scenarios, our hearts often beat beneath the characters bodies. Who hasn’t, at some point in their life, felt like an ‘insect’, ignored and cast off?

Thus, great books or artworks created in solitude, are also the means to develop our own solitude of thought. Whilst they might require a good deal of concentration, afterwards we mull them over, mediate, ponder and reflect on them in light of ourselves. This purges the mind of distraction and meaningless froth. It teaches us who we are, what we live by, and how we can better ourselves. As it happens, the lesson of Metamorphoses is that we shouldn’t expect comfort from others, but learn to be joyous alone. Even if we aren’t bugs!

So instead of getting agitated at the governments enforced solitude, why not see it as an opportunity to mould your own, original thoughts. We need not become great men of letters or paint, or be as half crazed as they in their approach to it. But we can be inspired by them to explore our own creativity.

This benefits all aspects of life, from relationships, to work-productivity, to everyday problem solving. More significantly, it respects your individuality. You are not a grain of dust or a blade of sand, but a free-willed, one of a kind human being with your own way of seeing the world. Trust yourself and reclaim your solitude.

If this is too tall a task, pick up a book or get yourself to an art gallery…