Centered in Solitude and Creative Beauty
Long before the pandemic hit and time apart from others became a regular topic of concern, Fenton Johnson was exploring the lives of solitaries—in part seeking a deeper understanding of his own existence, but also to comprehend more fully what it means to be centered within the community that is all of life. Those who live alone outside of a coupled relationship or family unit have often been looked at with suspicion and derided as hermits, loners, or deviants, but Johnson opens a window to seeing the unity of person, vision, and vocation that helps chart a path ahead for any who find themselves on this pilgrimage.
At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life by Fenton Johnson. W. W. Norton, 2020. $26.95.
By delving into the lives of creative artists who are esteemed more widely now than in their day, Johnson takes the reader past the initial recognition of their work to the lesser-known character of their living. Ranging from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau to the painter Paul Cézanne; poets Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Rabindranath Tagore to the novelists Eudora Welty, Henry James, and Zora Neale Hurston; musicians Nina Simone and Rod McKuen to the photographer Bill Cunningham, Johnson presents each one, alone or in tandem, as a model for the cultivation of an engaging and fruitful interior life that is alive to the world with keen sensitivity. Classifying those he examines as solitaries—the term favored by Thomas Merton—instead of as singles—Johnson perceives the common trait of a dedicated pursuit which compelled them into an ongoing or recurring existence of solitude that was not “tragedy or bad luck or loneliness,” but rather “an integral and necessary aspect of who they were…and their means of giving themselves to others” (9-10).
Johnson undertook this book “to study, learn from, and celebrate the lives of those who have been chosen by or who choose solitude” (202) and discovered that “[e]ach of these solitaries understood solitude as a vocation, a particular calling from an external force or destiny” (156). Here are but a few threads that invite us to look more closely at the intricately woven nature of their creative work and lives of existing:
Thoreau’s celebrated Walden took “four times as long to write as he spent living on the pond”—not surprising for someone who “teaches us to slow down and look at the world” (41) and discover religion as “[t]hat which is never spoken” (49).
Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Cézanne painted over a hundred times (compared to the twenty-five paintings he did of his wife), manifested a deep “psychology of the earth” for this melancholic steeped in solitude and sheds light on the religious way he understood that “every successful painting had to express the unity of all creation” (67).
Looking at Whitman and Dickinson together, one sees that they both “evolved from longing for a partner to a calm acceptance of solitude as their destiny and their gift” (77); they discovered “the conversion of loneliness into solitude” (85) which brought them deeper into the profound mystery that they contained everyone within themselves even as they were open to all outside of themselves.
In his writing, James emerges as a solitary contemplative who is “so sensitive to the world, so amazed by its spectacle” (96), yet who also observes the selfishness of many-a-conventional relationship and accepts the unmarried life as necessary for honing the skills of close observation and cultivating a sacrificial generosity of self.
Wedded to her homeplace in Jackson, Mississippi, Welty—the consummate writer—knew that although society often presents marriage and family as the best ways to give of oneself, she accepted it as better “to inhabit one’s hopes, joys, and disappointments fully, if alone, than to conform them to the sensibility of someone less realized” (117-118).
Tagore—who was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature—taught that “the individual is a microcosm of the world” (151) and that true love of self should lead to selfless generosity instead of “the environmental and social destruction of industrialization worldwide” (149) that he saw already in his time.
Hurston, the driven examiner of personality and culture, “made of herself a repository of African American folk and spiritual life,” even while “she spent the last years of her rich life working at odd jobs, living on welfare, and ended her days supported by others … buried with funds contributed by friends” (159-160). She knew the hardship and merit of solitary life within the network of community.
Exploring the lives of McKuen and Simone—both of whom survived horrific violence—Johnson finds musicians who were “deeply wounded solitaries” that learned additionally through “the burdens of fame combined with the constant assaults on their integrity” to transform “suffering into art” (173).
And in the ascetic, minimalistic life of photographer Cunningham—who had a genuine eye for fashion as well as for “real, honest, transformative love” (199)—Johnson holds up a true example of looking at the world as it is and not as we want it to be; a man who graciously and gracefully “showed us how to find beauty, for free, in our lives, on the street” (200).
Johnson’s own life is also worthy of examination as a solitary seized by beauty and a rooted sense of belonging, yet not-belonging. Growing up in Kentucky—not far from the Abbey of Gethsemani that was the monastic home of Thomas Merton—Johnson was the youngest of eight children in a family defined by conviviality. His father, who worked for a local distillery, supplied the monastery with bourbon for their fruitcakes and had a hand in the building of Merton’s hermitage as well as building a deep-woods secular version for himself. His mother fed and entertained not only her family but also the monks who showed up regularly at their place around suppertime for a visit. Reflecting on that vibrant childhood, Johnson observes that “it was that constant immersion in community that both led me to solitude but also gave me an experience of communal love—of love expressed not, as in the conventional marriage, one on one, but in community, whether in a small town or among the monks” (24).
Aware in his youth of the differences that set him apart from other boys—his ravenous love of reading, his desire to “watch time and the river, alone,” and a sexuality that diverged from the only form visibly known and accepted—Johnson felt the “burning desire to get out, to flee my tiny village and vast family, to save my fundamentally bent self” (22). Embarking upon college and encountering the allure of hitchhiking and backpacking treks widened his awareness of the rights of passage that for long have marked adulthood in many societies “with a solitary journey away from the safety of family and community” (24). Furthering his education and growing in life, Johnson had been in several monogamous relationships by the time he met the great love of his life in his mid-thirties, only to lose him to AIDS. His death plunged Johnson into profound and lasting grief. As the years and decades passed without entering another relationship, Johnson—who never set out to become a solitary—found himself valuing the solitude he had discovered, even amid times of harsh loneliness, and came to see what forges a solitary life centered in beauty, goodness, and giving.
Each person’s life is marked by some degree of solitude, whether it is the enduring character or simply a chapter; hence the relevance of this book for every reader. Embracing the convergence of being and belonging at the center of existence enables one to move from loneliness and isolation into the great silence of listening solitude. “I use solitude,” Johnson writes, “as the seeker uses a fast—to hone and sharpen, to engage the self and in doing so to break through the illusion of aloneness and emerge with my compassion and engagement with the world deepened and enriched. Through solitude, in contradiction to every message from our security-obsessed, wall-building society, I seek to open my heart” (214-215). And therein, he wisely observes, “those who have the most profound experience of solitude may have the most to teach … not only the writers and artists profiled in these pages, or LGBT people, but also the recently divorced woman, the postpartum mother, the grieving spouse, the terminally ill, the homeless—all those who suffer and who, for their duration of their suffering, whether it be a month or a year or a lifetime, are outliers, outsiders, outcasts” (14). For those who haven’t broken through to that paramount lesson of the pandemic—as well as to those who have—Johnson’s glimpses and gleanings will prove kind and creative mentors.
To the critics who opine that solitude is inherently selfish and subtracts one from benefitting society in favor of personal pursuits, Johnson does a masterful job supplying evidence to the contrary, citing that “both the Buddha and Jesus left behind their conventional families to establish instead a chosen family of solitaries” (119), that Whitman provided compassionate care to wounded soldiers and Welty tended to the needs of infirm relatives alongside the humane writings for which they are remembered, and that “Van Gogh, who from early on tried to live by Jesus’s words, whose efforts to give himself to others went wrong again and again” still through his paintings bears “silent witness to the power and importance and necessity of his love, not for one person but for everything and all” (219). This, Johnson asserts, is at the core of Jesus’ wisdom and life—locating “the self in a continual process of giving it away” (127), even as the term bachelor originally implied a knight engaged in a greater cause and a spinster was “an unmarried woman who made her living by spinning fiber into thread, bringing warmth and pleasure to our naked lives” (9).
While not disparaging marriage or partnered relationships, Johnson calls attention to the often-overlooked value of friendship and notes that “we must teach ourselves to value and attend to friends, not as way-stations between lovers or diversions from the real business of pairing up and marriage but as relationships of first consequence in their own right” (58) and adds that the best marriages he has observed are partnerships of friends—“allegiances between solitaries, where marriage is not a wall but an opening door” (211). Rather than fearing the demographic shift that has more people living alone in recent years as a sign that society’s foundation is crumbling, Johnson offers more optimistically that it holds “the potential for more diverse and loving relationships to one another and the planet” and suggests that “studying the works and lives of our solitaries is key to reconceiving our understanding of the human family” (4).
On my writing desk is a postcard with empty railroad tracks disappearing in the distance and John Milton’s words—“Solitude sometimes is best society”—along with another of a lone man in a boat, oars extended at both sides and white filament roots growing from the bottom of the hull into the dark water, accompanied by Langston Hughes’ line, “My soul has grown deep like the rivers.” To these I can now add Johnson’s kindred words: “The measure in which your solitude is hard is the measure of the reward it offers” (35). At the Center of All Beauty is a wise companion and mentor in friendship to everyone in their places and experiences of solitude.