"At The Center Of All Beauty" by Fenton Johnson

We are living Yeats’ prophecy:  things are falling apart and the center cannot hold.  In this time of chaos and pandemic, Fenton Johnson, in his book, At The Center Of All Beauty:  Solitude and The Creative Life (Norton, 2020), argues we need solitude.  It is fundamental to our ability to address this crisis in our culture and country.  He examines the lives and philosophies of people he calls “solitaries,” such as Henry David Thoreau, Paul Cezanne, Emily Dickinson and Bill Cunningham, and how being alone offers us a way to live life on our own terms while fostering art and human understanding.

We come into this world naked and alone, and we will leave the same way.  Johnson says our finite existence adds impetus and poignancy to our days.  He writes that “infinity draws me onward, the earth draws me back to the stardust from which I am made.  In my deepest heart I long to be one with the One; death along with birth is only a particularly striking milestone on a journey that, properly understood, has no beginning and no end.  Time, as the quantum physicists tell us, is an illusion; and if time is an illusion, then death is an illusion.  All moments are present to this moment…”

Solitude is not loneliness.  Johnson posits that solitude is a necessary part of every life, and our creativity, our sense of self, our relationships to other human beings all depend upon our level of comfort with being alone.  If we follow through and learn to be solitary, only then can the right action and thinking be possible.  Wisdom will come, argues Johnson, when we seek out and experience solitude.  We have much to learn from the “silent, solitary disciplines of reading and writing.”  We must revel in “the consciously chosen, deliberately inhabited discipline of silence.”  Johnson professes admiration for the life of the monastery and the monks who live in the moment, open to all the beauty of the world.  Fenton grew up near the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and knew the monks there, including the most famous monk in residence, Thomas Merton.  He uses the Trappist word “solitaries” to designate those who seek solitude.  Solitaries are those writers and artists who do not impose harmony, but through their solitude, come to an understanding of the harmony naturally present in this world.  We lose sight of such harmony because of our need to have material comfort and avoid the obligations that come from embracing a life alone.  The Buddhists believe in the imperfection of existence; we must learn to live with that imperfection—it may even be a source of beauty to the ascetic.

Some of the writers and artists Johnson examines are well known for their solitude.  Such is Henry David Thoreau, who voluntarily withdrew from society to live in his cabin at Walden Pond.  He was interested in getting to a deeper truth in life.  For others, the contemplation of solitude is the contemplation of death.  Emily Dickinson knew this contemplation intimately.  In many of her poems, she dwells in death.  Johnson cites a snippet of her poem, “#1515”:  “The Things that never can come back, are several—/Childhood—some forms of Hope—the Dead.”  Johnson describes both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as mystics, but he cautions that that word is a way to contain and dismiss those who understand the true nature of reality.  The artist is rewarded with wisdom and beauty but suffers the consequences of one who holds back full participation to observe the world.

Solitude, as a spiritual practice, has much to offer as a conduit of insights into this existence.  It would be a shame to give up the perspective to avoid loneliness.  On the contrary, solitude offers riches of which many of us are oblivious.  We fail to step back and see the world.  Johnson quotes Rabindranath Tagore:  “In order to know life as real one has to make its acquaintance through death…”  He notes that like a river to the sea, the soul flows toward its destiny.  Water becomes energy.  He sums up the predicament we find ourselves in today with the pandemic:  “Americans want direct action, but direct action is seldom the best means to the goal.”  What we need is patience, “to let the matter reveal itself for what it is.”  It seems these days that impatience and a lack of concern cripple us.  We have lost our way.  Solitude may be our only salvation.

Fenton Johnson cuts into the ego, the self-serving behavior, the narcissism and self-indulgence we find today.  We run and run to keep up, to avoid a solitary moment where we might consider our lives and the lives of others.  He makes a powerful case for solitude.  This does not mean loneliness or isolation—one can be a solitary in marriage, in daily life, in the middle of a crowd.  It is a mental state, a way of seeing the world.  And in this time of plague and uncertainty, we need it more than ever.