Memory

 A few years ago, in the crowded Pirate and Treasure Museum in St. Augustine, Florida, a tourist rasped “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” and I was transported to 1953, to Irinjalakuda, in Southwest India.  I was a little over three years old, in the darkness after dusk, sitting on the steps at the front of our house in this Kerala village of coconut trees, rice paddies, and creeks. From the house, a kerosene lantern threw a slanting beam of light on the steps I was sitting on. I heard my father, sisters, and a cousin singing “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum” from a book my father had been reading aloud. 

I chafed, but that feeling floated away. I stayed put, savoring the strains of this high-spirited shanty. The fleeting feeling of abandonment had yielded to a contentedness that neither needed nor wanted company.  

I have always loved solitude. In my thirties, I thought that I might always live alone, and it did not bother me. I savor my time alone, immersed in books, in music, or in thoughts—a party of one. 

My fleeting pique of loneliness in Irinjalakuda quickly yielded to solitary enjoyment. Perhaps I knew that I would not understand the book and become bored. My sisters always loved me with unquestioning constancy. Perhaps, keenly aware of their affection, I felt no envy, and consequently rejected loneliness and savored in serene solitude the raucousness inside.  Perhaps, wired in me is a psychologically healthy trait that allows me to enjoy solitude.

Mountains

In 1956, when I was six, we moved to the Nilgiris where my father was an engineer for a company tunneling water conduits through the mountains for hydroelectric plants (supplanting millions of kerosene lanterns). 

Our one-room wooden cabin under a zinc roof, in the tiny company “town,” was small and there were no schools, so my two sisters lived with our father’s parents in Coimbatore, a long fifty miles away. As the only boy in our town, I gadded about the open areas or played indoors with the limited toys I had—a small red Cadillac and a wooden sword I brandished to vanquish imagined foes. Love of solitude may have established itself during those years. Instead of school, my mother now read books to me.

At a picnic with my parents, in a meadow of yellow flowers, mountains above, thick forest encircling, I imagined encountering big cats and the Nilgiri bison, the largest and heaviest wild bovine in the world.

I view solitude as a big space filled with objects of interest that keeps my mind occupied. The space may be a sparsely populated wilderness with wildlife – the lone crocodile we spotted in a creek below on the hillside in the Nilgiris. We stopped our jeep and watched it disappear into the thick green foliage. The space may be confined between the covers of a book. The space may even be a small room, but filled with the sounds of a Bach fugue or the bluesy plaintive twang of a bent guitar string. I am alone in that space, but there is no ache of loneliness.

Big City

In 1958, we moved to Madras, and I suddenly became one of many schoolboys in the most populated South Indian City. There, my sisters returned to our house. I went to a school which only had about twenty students per class, but struck me as the most noisy and crowded place one could be in, compared to the idyllic mountain encampment. Neighborhoods spread out mile after mile, mostly quiet family homes of lime-brick or concrete. They contained pockets of packed marketplaces, vendor baskets filled with red, white, black, or green lentils, a riot of multicolored saris and shirts in slow moving throngs, and the alluring sialogenic aroma of mangoes, jackfruit, oranges, and bananas.

I adjusted to city life, made friends, played sports, acted in school plays, and felt no discomfort in crowds. But I never stopped cherishing the quietude of each of the five rented houses in which we lived. I often snuck off to a quiet room to read Ogden Nash and Tennyson, Dickens and Dumas, Thurber and Wodehouse, detective novels, and comic books (The Lone Ranger, Looney Tunes, Classics Illustrated).

By the time I was seventeen, my sisters had gotten married and left home. Then, for just over a year, it was my mother and I again, living in quiet companionship even though I had my friends and my interests, and she had her friends and her interests.

Hermits and Recluses

We humans are social animals. There are few who can live on their own as hermits. Robert Rodriguez, in The Book of Hermits, distinguishes between hermits and recluses—hermits seek solitude for a purpose whereas recluses have psychological issues that make them shun others.

In ancient times and into medieval ages, hermits often left society to seek answers to religious questions—Chinese and Indians, “desert” Christians in North Africa and the Middle East. Today, the Carthusians, a Catholic monastic order, lead eremetical lives in their cells spending their days reading and meditating. They even have food delivered out of sight, leaving the cells only for prayers and conferences.

The most famous American hermit, Henry David Thoreau, lived alone for over two years in a cabin he built near a pond, contemplating and writing about that time in Walden. As Walden Pond had frequent visitors, there is a question whether he was a true hermit. Walden alternates libertarianism with picturesque descriptions of nature and thoughts of its implications for humanity.

Christopher Knight, a recluse, drove through the Maine woods until his car ran out of gas. He abandoned it, walked off into the woods, and remained incommunicado for twenty-seven years, sustaining himself by stealing food from vacation cabins. He was eventually arrested and imprisoned in 2013. Asked about any insights from his years of solitude by Michael Finkel, who wrote a book about him, Knight offered, “Get enough sleep.”

My solitude is not the prolonged affair of a hermit or recluse. I am not spurning society when I seek seclusion. I am probably more of a hermit given my purposes, but as my periodic forays into solitude are short, I cannot claim to be a proper hermit. I have to admit, my “great insights” are often closer to Knight’s than Thoreau’s. Whereas I relish solitude, I am not uncomfortable with people, welcoming conversations at the rare party or social event I attend. My acquaintances may be surprised at my hunger for seclusion.

Loneliness

Whereas I view solitude as a wide-open space that I rejoice in, I find loneliness constraining and confining. I lived alone in my younger days and it never bothered me. The loneliness I have experienced has never been a general need for company. The only loneliness that I have felt has been from the loss of a loved one. Whether that was a relationship that fell apart or the death of a close friend or relative, there was an achy void that was irreplaceable. That loneliness would resolve over time when the emptiness dissipated and devolved as life went on; but on rare occasions, a triggered memory would waft in a forgotten sadness.

In 2022, the American Medical Association released a report on the epidemic of loneliness at the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The consequences of loneliness included the increased risk of heart disease, depression, and stroke.

In my thirties, alone in Florida around Christmas time, lonely and smarting from a broken relationship and struggling a little in finding a job, I decided to backpack into Sweetwater Lake. When I registered with the ranger, he asked me to let him know if I saw any wild pigs. I thought nothing of it until I crept into my sleeping bag that night, and then became petrified, gripped by frightful expectations of a large feral hog crashing through my pup tent and eviscerating me where I lay, its large tusks ripping me open as easily as the canvas of my tent.

Driving home the following day, it seemed that the terror had somehow lifted me out of my blues. I did not want to get mauled to death, but I also realized what that meant—I wanted to live, and I wanted more from life. I went seeking peace and quiet but instead found a stark reminder of death that ironically uplifted my outlook on life.

Solitude

Hermits seeking solitude, especially women other than in convents, have been looked upon with disfavor. In Solitude, The Science and Power of Being Alone, Netta Weinstein, Heather Hansen, and Thuy-vy T.Nguyen discuss how the handbook on witchcraft Malleus Maleficarium (Hammer of Witches) from 1486 “prompted two centuries of witch-hunting mania.” They quote from the book, “When a woman thinks alone, she is evil.” The authors discuss how we may overcome the stigma attached to solitude and how solitude may benefit us. A life filled with people, even ones we are close to, can be oppressive, with the conflicts of daily life rife with stresses and anxiety, and time spent alone can refresh our minds and bring relief. Solitude does not equate to loneliness.

In 1934, Admiral Richard Ross spent four months alone in the bitter cold of Antarctica to study the weather. Ultimately, he suffered from a shoulder injury, frostbite, and carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky stove that nearly killed him, was rescued, and felt “shame over my flimsiness.” But he concluded that he “appreciated the sheer beauty and miracle of life,’ and said, “I live more simply now, and with more peace.”

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild is about Chris McCandless, who at the age of twenty-four, went into the wilderness in Alaska, lived in an abandoned bus twenty-five miles from the nearest town, and died of starvation in a few months, in 1992. Whether he was a brash and impulsive novice or a brave but troubled young man seeking peace and self-reflection in the woods remains a subject of discussion. Timothy Treadwell “communed” with Alaskan brown bears and was killed by one. He became the subject of Werner Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man. Their stories caution us against too easily romanticizing the quest of solitude in the wilderness. Nature can be unforgiving, stressing the need for meticulous preparation to venture alone into the wilderness.

Nonetheless, I admire a lone bald eagle flying over Orange Lake on a sultry Florida day, swooping down, hovering, striking, and rising, clutching a yellow bass in its talons. I relish watching a regal solitary bull elk meandering on a ridge in the Sapphire Mountains of Montana. 

Finale

Solitude, sometimes combined with despair and loneliness, has given us sublime art, literature, and music. Wordsworth wandered lonely, and golden daffodils of early romantic poetry blossomed.  Emily Dickinson, musing softly to herself, tells us about the ribbons of sunrise and the purple stile of sunset, enriching our humanity with her lyricism. Beethoven, alone, deaf, often despondent, sometimes exhilarated, solitary in his room or on a stroll, invented and refined great music—heartbreaking pathos in the relentless funeral march of his symphony Eroica, and the epic Ninth Symphonywith its innovative ending, the rousing vocal Ode to Joy.

Seventy years since that nascent night in Irinjalakuda, now retired, my kids grown up and moved away, I have the time I want. I read, I write, I hike. On my walks, I enjoy the sounds of a hammering woodpecker and the sight of a large barn owl. I am grateful that when I mull and muse, unexpected past remembrances sometimes fetch treasures from islands of childhood memories.

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Vish Watkins is an Infectious Diseases physician. His work has appeared in Soundboard: The Journal of the Guitar Foundation of America, Moss Piglet, and The Write Launch.

ART BY:
Belinda Subraman
Grasshopper’s View
ink and acrylic paint