Michael Harris

Solitude

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With a foreword by Nicholas Carr, author of the Pulitzer Prize–finalist The Shallows.
Today, society embraces sharing like never before. Fueled by our dependence on mobile devices and social media, we have created an ecosystem of obsessive connection. Many of us now lead lives of strangely crowded isolation: we are always linked, but only shallowly so.
The capacity to be alone, properly alone, is one of life’s subtlest skills. Real solitude is a powerful resource we can call upon—a crucial ingredient for a rich interior life. It inspires reflection, allows creativity to flourish, and improves our relationships with ourselves and, unexpectedly, with others. Idle hands can, in fact, produce the extraordinary. In living bigger and faster, we have forgotten the joys of silence, and undervalued how profoundly it can revolutionize our lives.
This book is about discovering stillness inside the city, inside the crowd, inside our busy lives. With wit and energy, award-winning author Michael Harris weaves captivating true stories with reporting from the world’s foremost brain researchers, psychologists, and tech entrepreneurs to guide us toward a state of measured connectivity that balances quiet and companionship.

Solitude
is a beautiful and convincing statement on the transformative power of being alone.
This book is currently unavailable
235 printed pages
Original publication
2017
Publication year
2017
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Quotes

  • forgetenothas quoted4 years ago
    Scientists now agree with Jorge Luis Borges, who said, “Every time we remember something, after the first time, we’re not remembering the event, but the first memory of the event. Then the experience of the second memory and so on.” Through a brain process called reconsolidation, every retrieval of a given memory actually changes it. As one expert, Nelson Cowan, told me: “We edit the past in light of what we know now. But we remain utterly unaware that we’ve changed it.”
  • forgetenothas quoted4 years ago
    I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

    —Edith Wharton
  • forgetenothas quoted4 years ago
    pianist Glenn Gould, an eccentric genius who abruptly stopped giving concerts in 1964; he had retreated into the solitude of the studio and told an interviewer, “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now, what that X represents I don’t really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it’s a substantial ratio.”
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