Loneliness is often condemned. Especially poets and ditched lovers(who always become poets) are often seen castigating their loneliness which, according to them, is known to them only. Rather I have found hardly any lover not complaining his loneliness and not vindicating his claim to crown of the loneliest person of the world. So loneliness is more used in a negative and derogatory sense .But if we contemplate upon the merits and demerits of society then we may not find loneliness that ugly.
The poets who frown upon this and fill scores of pages and bottles of ink on explaining how lonely they are must not forget that whatever success they got in their fields was owing to the time and space they could provide to themselves. If that time and space is called loneliness, I won’t think it to be such a bad term as it is regarded generally.
Accumulate Samson Agonistes, Areopagatica, Lycidas, sonnets and all the pamphlets, but minus paradise Lost, Milton could not have accessed that majestic height below which all the lovers of literature bow their heads. This is well known that had Milton not been left marooned in the restoration era, bereft of the company of Cromwell and his comrades, he could not have engaged himself on such an enterprise which needed unthinkable amount of labour and devotion. Rather at that time of utter loneliness he was deprived of his eye sight also. Thus this loneliness was a blessing in disguise which illumined what was dark in him.
When Yeats was awarded Nobel Prize, the media ran to Maud Gonne and thought now she would accept the love of his Nobel Laureate lover. But she humbly said (what none would disbelieve), that had W.B.Yeats not been left alone by denial of her love, he could never have been able to get the accomplishment which eternalized him.
Goutam Buddha left his palace, spousal pleasures and son, went for meditation to the dense forests. At the final moments of his enlightenment even his five disciples had deserted him as they disapproved of his pursuing the middle path and taking food. After gaining the enlightenment the first thing he did was to find those five disciples and they now accepted the person they had left alone and popularized his doctrine.
The ancient Indian sages left their houses and pursued the probe of truth in silent caves of Himalaya and other lonely places. After staying alone for years and forgetting the rest of the world, being bearded in carelessness and letting even the heap of leaves gather on them, letting serpents crawl over them, letting the water level mount on their heads, completely concentrated on their meditation, they would eventually succeed in getting the glimpse of their gods and getting their desired wishes granted. It’s a kind of allegorical representation of the fact that if you have to materialize any wish of yours you have to be determined and act with full concentration singularly without the least interest in the other happenings in the rest of the world and in complete loneliness.
If we turn the wheel of history we shall find all great men who have achieved anything significant in their lives have most often stayed alone at least in the moment of their achieving the illumination which religious people call enlightenment. The society always rewards the virtue of loneliness. Everyone knew Shakespeare after his being coroneted to the throne of the greatest dramatist of the world but no one knows where he was in the two mysterious years before his coming to London. I bet it was in these two years that he flourished the genius in his mind by giving complete attention to himself.
The approval of society is regarded as the immediate yardstick of the measurement of success which one has got in loneliness though sometimes the society takes time to recognize true merits (as in the case of Galileo). Still society is always pleasurable as it evaluates the talent of individuals sooner or later. One can’t see himself or herself except the help of mirror. Society acts as a mirror. That’s why party, congregation and all sorts of social gatherings are arranged. Getting well dressed, bathed with perfume people go to attend them. In these social gathering we show our fashionable attire, fashionable thinking and every thing else that we think will amuse the society. As a poet, in a gathering, recites his poem composed in loneliness, he gets the applause of the listeners. The preacher throws light on the secret shortcut which he has found (in his lonely contemplation on the matters of divinity) to attain salvation and expects the listeners to follow the same. The scholar puts forth in the society his unique profound view which he has attained by licking thousands of pages of voluminous books in his lonely cubicle. So, in all kinds of gatherings people go with the stuff they have prepared in their lonely kitchen. In the society they give the people the chance to taste their cookery and get appreciated for their culinary skills. Obviously one can prepare cake where as the other prepares sandwich. In other words everyone is a seller eager to show his merchandise to the buyer. Even in kitty party where ladies go with apparently no serious intentions in their heads show the piece of beauty they have converted themselves into after endless hours of make up, dressing etc in their private rooms. Thus it’s no more to be proved that people desire the society to show their accomplishments achieved in utter loneliness. That loneliness is never ugly.
Time passes like “a winged chariot” when you are in company of friends, lover, beloved and whoever important in or your life. People even go to the extent of comparing a moment of loneliness with years of normal time. But we forget that time is the most important possession we have with us. So, its desirable that one should deliberately try o multiply his time in loneliness and if a second passes like a year in loneliness one should try to get the year’s job done in that very precious second.
Neither am I neither condemning society nor supporting individualism. Man is a social animal and every Robinson will cherish the company of even a dog in the uninhabited island. But I am simply trying to access the value of loneliness. Rather man of talent should be left alone (not for their entire life of course) so that they can contemplate and carry out their ingenious plans coolly “far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife” and he can be more beneficial to society.
Otherwise you can conjecture how perilous society can be. Suppose commonwealth of Cromwell had continued , Wordsworth had been engrossed in his French revolution, Bacon had never been left alone even to continue what he called his “dispersed meditation” then we would have inherited an irrevocable loss.
All great works of the world are done in loneliness. John Logie Baird, when he invented television, was all alone. Even to experiment his success he had difficulty to find a security guard to stand in front of the screen for test. Now television unites the world and makes it a global village. So this loneliness which has helped in so much progress of the world is to be admired and given the due status it has always deserved but never achieved. I would call this loneliness creative solitude as it helps in creating, innovating and one can see his own soul and have a intra-soul chat.
umesh patra
