O! Solitude, my sweetest choice
Places devoted to the night,
Remote from tumult, and from noise,
How you my restless thoughts delight!
“Solitude,” Katherine Philips (1632-1664) translation of Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant
Until the age of seven or eight, whenever the young Albert Einstein was asked a question, he would slowly formulate and answer, mutter it tentatively to himself, and finally repeat aloud his considered response.
This laborious method of speaking gave the impression that he needed to say everything twice. His parents consulted a doctor, and the family housekeeper called the boy stupid. Decades later, Einstein’s sister Maja recorded this odd childhood habit and attributed it to her brother’s thoroughness in thinking. Yet the doubling of each sentence, once for himself and once for everyone else, may also have been an early sign of the deep inner world that Einstein inhabited. Brilliant, supremely self-confident, brutally honest, witty, stubborn – Einstein was above all else a loner, a person who lived inside his solitude.
In an essay for Forum and Century magazine in 1931, Einstein wrote
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a “lone traveler” and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude
Einstein’s comment about solitude reminds me of similar comments made by the Austrian-Bohemian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived and worked at the same time as Einstein.
In a letter dated July 16, 1903, addressed to a younger poet asking for career advice, Rilke wrote
Everything that may some day be possible to many the solitary man can now prepare and build with his hands, that err less. Therefore, dear sir, love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you. For those who are near you are far, and that shows it is beginning to grow wide about you. And when what is near you is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very large; rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you.
Artists, scientists, and other creatives have always valued solitude – a place of stillness and quiet where we are able to explore the hallways of our imagination – musical tones, colors, ideas, movements. Gustav Mahler routinely took three or four-hour walks after lunch, stopping to jot down ideas in his notebook. Carl Jung did his most creative thinking and writing when he took time off from his frenzied practice in Zurich to go to his country house in Bollingen. In the middle of a writing project, Gertrude Stein wandered about the countryside looking at cows. Picasso said that “Nothing can be accomplished without solitude. I have made a kind of solitude for myself which nobody is aware of.”
Solitude differs from loneliness. Loneliness is an emptiness, a dark cave, a sadness, a longing for other people. By contrast, a person immersed in the fulfillment of solitude does not need other people. She is at home in herself. She is self sufficient. She draws strength from a deep well within herself. She may embrace and rejoice in the company of others at certain times, but she also celebrates her time alone.
Einstein was born in 1879, Rilke in 1875. Both suffered at a young age under the harsh authority of strict teachers and military tradition. As Einstein’s sister Maja recalled in her unpublished 1924 biography of her brother, Einstein’s grade-school teacher taught her students the multiplication tables with the help of whacks on the hand. Instead of playing with other boys, young Albert liked to work out puzzles, to create complicated constructions out of building blocks, and, with great patience and determination, to build houses of cards many stories high. At age 16, after an argument with one of his teachers at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, Einstein abruptly dropped out of school. For the next few years, he voraciously read physics and mathematics on his own. After graduation from the Zurich Polytechnic in 1900, he was turned down in all of his applications to work with various professors of physics in Europe – most probably because he had not kowtowed to his own professors at the Polytechnic and so received only luke-warm recommendations from them. In 1902, Einstein finally received a job offer to work as a lowly clerk in the patent office in Bern Switzerland. It was there, over the next few years, that the young Einstein did much of his most brilliant work on relativity, quantum physics, and the understanding of molecular sizes – all accomplished in almost total isolation from the rest of the scientific community.
Rilke was born December 4, 1875, in Prague. His father was a railway official, his mother born into a well-to-do family. Rilke’s mother Phia wanted her son to be the daughter who had died only one week after birth and treated him as if he were a girl. According to Rilke, he had to wear “fine clothes” and “was a plaything [for his mother], like a big doll.” Like Einstein, Rilke was a quiet boy with a deep inner world and artistic sensitivities. His parents pressured him into entering a military academy in Sankt Pölten, Lower Austria, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left because of illness. One of Rilke’s teachers at the academy, Parson Horaček, remembered the young Rilke as “a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy, who liked to keep to himself, patiently enduring the compulsions of boarding-school.” After the military academy Rilke moved to Linz, where he attended trade school. There, at age 16, he became infatuated with a young townsgirl and ran off with her. A few days later, the young couple was found in a hotel room in Vienna, and Rilke was expelled from school. (Einstein also indulged in a number of romantic adventures, starting at a young age.)
In 1902, a beginning young poet named Franz Xaber Kappus, not yet twenty years old, wrote a letter to Rilke asking for guidance. At the time, Rilke himself was only twenty six, but he had already published several volumes of poetry, to some acclaim. (Einstein was also twenty six when he worked out the theory of relativity in the patent office in Berne.) According to Kappus, “many weeks passed before a reply came. The blue-sealed letter bore the postmark of Paris, weighed heavy in the hand, and showed on the envelope the same beautiful, clear, sure characters in whtih the text was set down from the first line to the last.” And so began a six-year correspondence between Rilke and Kappus. The ten letters are collected in one of my most precious books, Letters to a Young Poet. Other excerpts from those letters:
Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart. Acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied your to write. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write?
Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticis
In this terrible time of the virus, there is much suffering, but there is also the opportunity for solitude. For many of us, the pace of life has slowed. For many of us, we find ourselves alone with our thoughts. Time has shifted. Something lost may be regained. And that is the restoration of our inner selves. By inner self, I mean that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that invents, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom. My inner self roots me to me, and to the ground beneath me. The sunlight and soil that nourish my inner self are solitude and personal reflection. When I listen to my inner self, I hear the breathing of my spirit. Those breaths are so tiny and delicate, I need stillness to hear them, I need slowness to hear them. I need vast, silent spaces in my mind. I need privacy. Without the breathing and the voice of my inner self, I am a prisoner of the frenzied world around me. I am prisoner of my job, my money, the clothes in my closet. For these strange months, I have a chance to recreate myself, and the world.
Notes
“My passionate sense of social justice . . . ” Forum and Century, vol. 84, pgs 193-194 (1931). Also in Ideas and Opinions, by Albert Einstein, trans Sonja Bargmann (New York: Modern Library, 1994), pg 10
“Everything that may some day . . . ” Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans by M.D. Herter (New York: Norton, 1962), pg, 39
“Nothing can be accomplished without solitude . . . ” Original in Spanish, 1932 June 15, ABC Diario Ilustrado (Madrid), Informaciones y noticias del extranjero: ABC en Paris, conversation Appeared in English in New York Times, July 17, 1960, Opinion of the Week: At Home and Abroad: Ideas and Men, Page E9,
“fine clothes . . . ” A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, Donald A. Prater (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pg 5
“a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy . . . ” Letters to a Young Poet, op cit., pg 11
“many weeks passed before a reply came . . . ” Letters to a Young Poet, op cit., pg 12-13.
“Search for the reason that bids you to write . . . ” letter dated February 17th, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet, op cit, pg, 18-19
“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness . . . . ” letter dated April 23, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet, op cit, pg 29.
Reading:
“The Einstein Papers: Childhood Showed a Gift for the Abstract,” by Walter Sulivan, New York Times, March 27, 1972, pg 1.
Winteler-Einstein Maja, Albert Einstein –Beitrag für sein Lebensbild, 1924, reprinted in abridged form in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein Vol. 1: The Early Years,1879–1902 (CPAE, Vol. 1), Stachel, John, Cassidy, David C., and Schulmann, Robert (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp xlviii-lxvi.
Albert Einstein, by Albrecht Fölsing, trans. By Ewald Osers (New York: Viking, 1997)
Rilke, A Soul History by Daniel Polikoff (Wilmette IL: Chiron, 2011)
“The Virus is a Reminder of Something Lost Long Ago,” by Alan Lightman, the Atlantic, April 1, 2020
Indeed I have been using this shutdown time as a writing retreat; I have been trying some old fragments and rewriting a short novel, most of which seem to be about trying to find a balance in the cyclical swings between hungers for people– company, love– and solitude for work– writing and reading. Loneliness and loneness. And, oddly, the hand-written original draft of this piece is from when I was 25 or 26. I am thoroughly enjoying this.