Solitude
Disconnected
July 15, 1967
156
“The new technology is marvelous,” said an awed Frank Stanton, longtime president of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He could look up at the sky above his New York office and envision a time when satellites carried CBS’s news programs far and wide. That’s certainly the case today, and it’s not the only change in communications that Forbes saw coming: everything from smartphones—a.k.a. “miniaturized ‘Dick Tracy’ phones,” as we called them—to information instantly available via computer to a proliferation of television channels that would force any serious presidential candidate to be “a photogenic TV personality.” A few predictions went awry, including that the U.S. Postal
Service, a “ponderous institution” even in 1967, would go electronic. But it was also clear that these innovations would come with a cost, something felt keenly in socially distant 2020. “If our only main contact with people is
electronic, then we can’t have real feelings,” warned
Dr. Harry Levinson, an expert on mental health at the Menninger Foundation in Topeka, Kansas. “We can’t know
each other . . . . We may get a vast knowledge of what’s going on, but at the price of isolating people.”
“Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“The more you tell your story, your dreams and your entrepreneurial hopes, the more you will see that you’re not alone in either your striving or your doubts.”
—Gloria Steinem
“Whoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”
—Francis Bacon
“It’s good for a person to spend time alone. It gives them an opportunity to discover who they are, and to figure out why they’re always alone.”
—Amy Sedaris
“I was never less alone than when by myself.”
—Edward Gibbon
“Solitude is a kind of freedom.”
—Umberto Eco
“Every time I find myself a little uncomfortable, I know I’m in the right place.”
—Cristina Mittermeier
“To be an adult is to be alone.”
—Jean Rostand
“Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is the richness of self.”
—May Sarton
“Solitude is the fate of all outstanding minds: It will at times be deplored, but it will always be chosen as the lesser of two evils.”
—Arthur Schopenhauer
“Sometimes the best way to fight is on the flank, not in the center of the activity where your opponent masses its own force.”
—Herb Kelleher
“You cannot escape yourself, for God has singled you out.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Maybe this is who I really am. Not a loner, exactly, but someone who can be alone.”
—Gary Shteyngart
“This truth—to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’ ”
—Matthew Arnold
“Loneliness is to endure the presence of one who does not understand.”
—Elbert Hubbard
“Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled; neither let them be afraid.”
—John 14:27