Solitude_A Return to the Self

by Anthony Storr

  Can you imagine what it is like being a prisoner for life, your dreams turn into nightmares and your castles to ashes, all you think about is fantasy and in the end you turn your back on reality and live in a contorted world of make-believe, you refuse to accept the rules of fellow-mortals and make ones that will fit in with your own little world, there is no daylight in this world of the ‘lifer’, it is all darkness, and it is in this darkness that we find peace and the ability to live in a world of our own, a world of make-believe.14

  The examples cited in this chapter demonstrate that separation from the stimuli of ordinary, day-to-day existence can be therapeutic or disruptive according to circumstances: more especially, according to whether such separation is imposed or voluntary. Length of time is also important. It is probable, though not definitely established, that prolonged periods of removal from ordinary life have permanently deleterious effects, whether enforced by others or not.

  However, conditions of imprisonment vary widely, and, in the past, were sometimes less rigorous than they are today. Several notable examples exist which demonstrate that partial solitude and estrangement from normal life, even in prison, can encourage creative production.

  The Roman philosopher Boethius attained the important position of magisler offiaorum under the Ostrogothic king Theodoric. This involved being head of the civil service and chief of the palace officials, a position which can have left little time for his favourite pursuit, the study of philosophy. But Theodoric’s trust in Boethius did not persist. The philosopher was accused of treason, arrested, condemned, and sent into exile to await execution. While imprisoned in Pavia, Boethius composed The Consolation of Philosophy, the work by which he is now chiefly remembered. He was tortured and then bludgeoned to death in 524 or 525 AD.

  Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Chancellor from 1529, was imprisoned in the Tower of London for refusing to repudiate papal supremacy and to accept the King as head of the Church of England. More spent over a year in prison before his trial and execution in 1535. During this period he wrote A Dialoge of Cumfurt against Tribulacion which has been described as a masterpiece of Christian wisdom.

  Sir Walter Raleigh, being accused of treason, was sentenced to death. But his death sentence was suspended, and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London from 1603 to 1616. As in the case of Sir Thomas More, we may suppose that the conditions imposed were not too rigorous, for, during these years, Raleigh wrote The History of the World. This spanned the period from the Creation to the second century BC and was published in 1614. On his release, Raleigh undertook a second expedition to Guiana. Unfortunately, this was unsuccessful. The promised gold was not forthcoming; Raleigh’s suspended death sentence was revived, and he was executed in 1618.

  John Bunyan, who had joined the Bedford Separatist Church in about 1655, preached his unorthodox beliefs without hindrance until the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. On 12 November of that year, he was brought before the magistrates accused of holding services not in conformity with those of the Church of England. In January 1661, he was committed at the assizes to Bedford county jail, where he remained until March 1672. However, the conditions of his imprisonment were sufficiently liberal to allow him visits to his friends and family, and even occasional preaching. During the twelve years of his confinement, he wrote his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding (1666), and almost certainly composed a considerable part of The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Declaration of Indulgence to Nonconformists issued by Charles II which allowed Bunyan’s release was later withdrawn, and Bunyan was again imprisoned for illegal preaching in 1677.

  On Christmas Day 1849, Dostoevsky began the long journey from St Petersburg to Siberia where he was to spend the next four years in a prison camp. Together with other members of the Petrashevsky circle, he had been arrested in April 1849, and had already spent eight months as a prisoner in the Peter and Paul fortress. During this initial period, he was in solitary confinement, and at first was not allowed books or writing materials. In spite of this, he discovered that he had inner resources which enabled him to tolerate captivity far better than he had initially expected. His arrest may even have saved him from breakdown, rather than precipitating it; for there is evidence that his participation in an underground revolutionary organization had been preying on his mind during the previous winter, and had brought him to the edge of collapse.

  When, at the beginning of July, the prisoners were allowed to receive books from the library of the fortress, Dostoevsky fell upon them. He also wrote to his brother Mikhail telling him that he had thought out three stories and two novels. The famous incident of the mock execution in Semenovsky Square, when Dostoevsky faced a firing squad, only to be reprieved at the last minute, followed on 22 December. In Siberia, Dostoevsky’s only literary activity was to keep a surreptitious notebook in which he noted down the phrases and expressions used by his fellow convicts. He managed to give the notebook to one of the medical assistants who returned it to him on his release. Its contents were used in House of the Dead, the book which described Dostoevsky’s prison camp experience.

  This experience was horrific, not only because of the appalling physical conditions in which the convicts were housed, and the perpetual threat of flogging under which they lived, but because Dostoevsky found himself, as a ‘gentleman’, totally rejected by the brutish peasant prisoners whose cause he had espoused and for whose sake, as a potential revolutionary, he was suffering exile and imprisonment. During the time of his imprisonment, Dostoevsky underwent a conversion experience in which his total disillusion with the peasantry was replaced by an almost mystical belief in their essential goodness. This was based upon an involuntary memory which came back to him from his childhood of an incident in which one of his father’s serfs, Marey, had comforted him when he was terrified. Although Dostoevsky suffered deeply from never being physically alone whilst in the prison camp, his emotional isolation and lack of companionship had had the effect of turning his attention inward, and allowing his mind to wander in the past.

  All through his four years in camp he had employed this technique of involuntary association, which probably served somewhat the same purpose as psychoanalysis or drug therapy in releasing repressed memories and thereby relieving his psychic blockages and morbid fixations. This technique also served the additional and reassuring function of keeping alive his artistic faculties under conditions where he was forbidden to put pen to paper.15

  Dostoevsky’s experience of penal servitude permanently influenced his view of human nature and hence permeated his novels. More particularly, his experience of seeing convicts who for years had been ruthlessly crushed suddenly break out and assert their own personalities, often in violent and irrational fashion, made him feel that individual self-expression or self-realization was a basic human need, a need which did not accord with the subordination of individuality to the collective demands of the State required by Socialism.

  There are also less admirable examples of literary endeavour being furthered by imprisonment. The Marquis de Sade was recurrently imprisoned throughout his life until he was finally confined in the asylum at Charenton, where he died on 2 December 1814, at the age of seventy-four. His perverse imagination flourished in captivity, and it is to the fortresses of Vincennes and the Bastille that we owe such works as Justine and Les 120 Journées de Sodome.

  Sade’s infatuation with absolute power found echoes in the writings of Adolf Hitler, another author whose works owed something to imprisonment. After the failure of his putsch in Munich, Hitler was confined in the old fortress of Landsberg. Although he received a five-year sentence, he spent less than nine months in prison, where he was treated as an honoured guest. It was during this period that he began to dictate Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess.

  ‘Without my imprisonment,’ Hitler remarked long afterward, ‘Mein Kampf would never have been written. That period gave me the chance of deepening various notions for which I then had only an instinctive feeling.’16
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br />   In contrast to most of the examples given in this chapter, it is occasionally recorded that even solitary confinement imposed by enemies can be the trigger for psychological experiences of lasting value. Anthony Grey, who experienced solitary confinement in China, and Arthur Koesder, who was similarly imprisoned in Spain, discussed their experiences together on television. The transcript of their discussion appears in Koesder’s collection of essays, Kaleidoscope.

  Both men were grateful that they did not have to share a cell with another prisoner. Both felt that solitude enhanced their appreciation of, and sympathy with, their fellow men. Both had intense experiences of feeling that some kind of higher order of reality existed with which solitude put them in touch. Both felt that trying to put this experience into words tended to trivialize it, because words could not really express it. Although neither man subscribed to any orthodox religious belief, both agreed that they had felt the abstract existence of something which was indefinable or which could only be expressed in symbols.

  Anthony Grey thought that his experience had given him a new awareness and appreciation of normal life. Koesder concurred, but added that he had also become more aware of horrors lurking under the surface. Koesder also refers to a

  feeling of inner freedom, of being alone and confronted with ultimate realities instead of with your bank statement. Your bank statement and other trivialities are again a kind of confinement. Not in space but in spiritual space … So you have got a dialogue with existence. A dialogue with life, a dialogue with death.

  Grey comments that this is an area of experience into which most people do not enter. Koesder rightly affirms that most people have occasional confrontations of this kind

  when they are severely ill or when a parent dies, or when they first fall in love. Then they are transferred from what I call the trivial plane to the tragic or absolute plane. But it only happens a few times. Whereas in the type of experience which we shared, one has one’s nose rubbed into it, for a protracted period.17

  So, occasionally, good can come out of evil. Anthony Grey recalled being shown a painting by a Chinese friend in which a beautiful lotus flower is growing out of mud. The human spirit is not indestructible; but a courageous few discover that, when in hell, they are granted a glimpse of heaven.

  5

  The Hunger of Imagination

  ‘Were it not for imagination, Sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a Duchess.’

  Samuel Johnson

  We have seen that the capacity to be alone is a valuable resource. It enables men and women to get in touch with their deepest feelings; to come to terms with loss; to sort out their ideas; to change attitudes. In some instances, even the enforced isolation of prison may encourage the growth of the creative imagination.

  Imagination, it is safe to say, is more highly developed in human beings than in any other creature. Although animals dream, and sub-human primates certainly show some capacity for invention, the range of human imagination far outstrips that exhibited by even the cleverest ape. It is clear that the development of human imagination is biologically adaptive; but it is also the case that we have had to pay a certain price for this development. Imagination has given man flexibility; but in doing so, has robbed him of contentment.

  The behaviour of creatures lower down the evolutionary scale than ourselves is often largely governed by pre-programmed patterns. Some of these patterns, like the display of the bower-bird, or the hunting habits of wasps, are beautiful and elaborate. So long as the animal follows these age-old patterns, its behaviour is fitted to the environment as closely as a key fits a lock. If the environment remains constant, the animal’s basic needs, for survival and for reproduction, will be provided for in more or less automatic fashion. (I am tempted to engage in anthropomorphism, and to say that such an animal could be considered ‘happy’.) But if the environment changes, the animal whose behaviour is governed by pre-programmed patterns is at a disadvantage, for it cannot easily adapt to changing circumstances.

  Human beings, because their behaviour is principally governed by learning and by the transmission of culture from generation to generation, are much more flexible. Babies are provided with a certain number of built-in responses in order to ensure their survival; but the most distinctive feature of human behaviour is that so much is learned, so little innately determined. This is what has enabled men to survive in extreme climates, from the Equator to the Poles, in places which provide little or nothing of what they need. Men have even managed to leave the earth altogether, and learned how to exist for long periods in space. Such environments demand the exercise of ingenuity and skill. Survival cannot be ensured unless intelligence and imagination take over from innate patterns in making provision for basic needs.

  But the price of flexibility, of being released from the tyranny of rigid, inbuilt patterns of behaviour, is that ‘happiness’, in the sense of perfect adaptation to the environment or complete fulfilment of needs, is only briefly experienced. ‘Call no man happy till he dies,’ said Solon. When individuals fall in love, or cry ‘Eureka’ at making a new discovery, or have the kind of transcendental emotion described by Wordsworth as being ‘surprised by joy’, they feel blissfully at one with the universe: but, as everyone knows, such experiences are transient.

  In a previous book, I suggested that dissatisfaction with what is, or ‘divine discontent’, was an inescapable part of the human condition. As Samuel Johnson pointed out, the present passes so quickly that we can hardly think at all except in terms of the past or the future. When the philosopher Imlac takes Rasselas to visit the Great Pyramid, he speculates upon why the pyramid was ever built.

  The narrowness of the chambers proves that it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasures might have been reposited at far less expense with equal security. It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some enjoyment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy must enlarge their desires.1

  What Johnson calls that ‘hunger of imagination’ is also a necessary feature of human adaptation. Man’s extraordinary success as a species springs from his discontent, which compels him to employ his imagination. The type of modern man who exhibits more discontent than any other, Western man, has been the most successful.

  There are, at first sight, some exceptions to what I have just written. In certain parts of the world, small communities still exist in which traditional ways of life have continued unchanged for centuries. Without knowing more about their inner imaginative lives, it is impossible to tell how much the members of such communities suffer from discontent; but even the best adapted probably imagine a heaven in which they will be protected from danger and released from toil. What is tragically certain is that such groups are always at risk, because, like animals governed by inbuilt patterns of behaviour, they find it hard to adapt to the impact of Western civilization. It is always the dissatisfied who triumph. Western man has treated with appalling cruelty the aborigines of Australia, the Indians of both North and South America, the inhabitants of Africa and India, and many other groups. But, given the restless inventiveness of the West, displacement of traditional groups of men is probably inevitable, even when segregation and extermination have not been deliberately employed.

  Discontent, therefore, may be considered adaptive because it encourages the use of the imagination, and thus spurs men on to further conquests and to ever-increasing mastery of the environment. At first sight, this proposition appears to concur with Freud’s conception of phantasy. For Freud wrote, in his paper ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’,

  We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one. The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of an unsatisfying reality.2

  However, Freud’s view of phantasy is that it is essentially escapist, a turnin
g away from reality rather than a preliminary to altering reality in the desired direction, as I am proposing. Freud considered that phantasy was derived from play, and that both activities not only pertained to childhood, but were also a denial of reality.

  The growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called daydreams.3

  Freud believed that infants were originally dominated by the pleasure principle: that is, by the need to avoid pain and to obtain pleasure. When instinctive needs, for food, warmth, or comfort, disturbed the infant’s rest, the infant would react by hallucinating what it needed.

  Whatever was thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner, just as still happens today with our dream-thoughts every night. It was only the non-occurrence of the expected satisfaction, the disappointment experienced, that led to the abandonment of this attempt at satisfaction by means of hallucination. Instead of it, the psychical apparatus had to decide to form a conception of the real circumstances in the external world and to endeavour to make a real alteration in them. A new principle of mental functioning was introduced; what was presented to the mind was no longer what was agreeable but what was real. This setting-up of the reality principle proved to be a momentous step.4