Response to Rachel's Solitude- by Lizzie

I really enjoyed your post Rachel, nice job! I too found myself thinking similar thoughts about being alone and the “norms” of our society today. Thoreau seems to have retained or maybe found something that we, as citizens in a fast-pace, technological society aren’t willing to discover. I was brought back to the footnote that read “Just as true silence is hard to come by, astronomers report that real darkness has all but vanished as well, that even deep in the woods the sky glows with urban wattage.” (pg. 123) We replace the starlight with the light of our houses filled with people, electronics, and clutter of our lives. Our society has seemed to have taken the solitary out of solitary confinement. Looking at this term, solitary confinement, as a positive experience (not as in relating to prison!) we in our time period, can imagine that being alone, no contact with others, would be “psychological torture”. But why is this so horrible to comprehend? Being in a place by yourself, all alone, nothing but you and the world or nature for that matter, to form a bond and finding yourself being swept off your feet by the “thing” around you of which we take for granted, how can this be a “weird” or bad experience? Our culture confines each individual to their own section of the world, impressing upon them to experience some form of nature- to be “enlightened”, if you will, yet all the while we remain in a crowd of hundreds continually searching to find that “perfect” experience. By all of us trying to be alone, we are all together. Why have we lost Thoreau’s idea of solitude, of being alone and experiencing whatever comes along?

Thoreau had the right idea, we must give up parts of the world, of society, materials and in exchange receive nature, letting go of all that is unimportant. We don’t “need” a lot to survive but our world has transformed the mind into thinking that more is better. The cycle mentioned earlier on in Thoreau, we work for money, money that is used to buy more things, but the more we have, the more we want, and thus the more we must work. We lose all solitude, all relation to our own self and to nature when we exchange going for a walk for watching episodes of “Sex and the City” (yes I am guilty). Through working with the land, planting, growing, living, Thoreau expresses the thought, “What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?” (146).This seemingly insignificant sentence brings be back to the beginning of the reading and to your comments Rachel. Being alone, finding a place in the world where we are content by ourselves, choosing to see “solitary confinement” not as being forced to be alone but as a different state of “aloneness”. It transforms from us merely learning about the land to us “being” with the land and in another more profound experience the land is “with” us.

Why can’t be put down the TV changer, the ipod, the music and magazines and exchange them for some solitude, confining ourselves to the outdoors, to nature’s changes, to the music of the trees, and the “readings” we can do of all the animals we see. Thoreau found something that we lack today. If a man or woman were to confine themselves in the woods, alone, just to “experience” nature, we would call them crazy. But Thoreau could have called them scholars, maybe poets, maybe even the alternate to the “savage”. How can we get back to this time? Until I can learn to let go of “Sex and the City” and get outside into nature alone, I will forever be ignorant to the things I could experience. But as many, my excuse, with the learning words from society, would of course be, “I’ll miss the good episode!” What about the episode of nature taking place everyday right under my nose? I am missing all the good parts.