“ So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other.
The ability to engage in introspection…is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.
“So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time.
—
From William Deresiewicz’s “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education,” which has been popping up everywhere in my links lately. A former Yale English prof, Deresiewicz rails against the evolution of elite institutions from intellectual, idealist havens to social status factories.
I have mixed feelings about the arguments backing this major theme (and so haven’t really formulated my response to the essay), but his aside on the increasing lack of introspection in our world of electronically fused relationships rings clearly.
If we allow ourselves to be in constant contact, we’re missing out on the solitary moments spent preparing ourselves to experience the world. And then we just drift through life as passive sponges — hyper-aware, but unprepared and unresponsive.