Up: [[Hestia]] Created: 2025-11-15 Some thoughts about solitude from *Fifty Days of Solitude* by Doris Grumbach. Doris was an elderly writer who spent 50 days alone in a remote house in Maine in the winter of 1993. She’d had a difficult time helping to take care of a young friend who died of AIDS and hoped to use the alone time to reclaim herself. _________ We know we exist because other people see us and approve of us. When there’s no one there to see you, you can start to question your own existence. Doris became bored with the sound of her own thoughts, found that they often weren’t worth listening to. She found that the best reading material for solitude was poetry. Despite having long times alone she found that her attention span was short. She thinks maybe that’s because there were so many possibilities of what she could do with all of this alone time, that she couldn’t concentrate for long on any one thing. She’d often be up in the middle of the night doing things, said that proper time doesn’t matter at all when you’re alone. I anticipate that this will one day be very true for me. #Aware Doris couldn’t make plans. She said she’d go off on tangents when other people weren’t there to have expectations of her time, and that the tangents were often the best parts. Again, I expect this will be true for me. Also, it’s something I’m trying to establish now in my life even without solitude. She preserved her peace of mind by not listening to the news. Her position is that writers need to be up to speed on what’s happening in the world until they’re in their 50s or early 60s but that after that they can, as she did, preserve their limited time for contemplation of the more important questions of life that she’d had no time for when she was younger. Doris concludes that solitude can be great for the elderly (see [[Quotes - Silence and Solitude]]) but it’s terrible for young people who rely on the opinion of others rather than respecting their own values. Under those conditions it’s isolation, loneliness and, if bad enough, suicide.