Sometimes, I wonder what fuels my desire to be alone. Did I always feel this need to be alone? Is this preference a result of being the youngest kid in a big family with older parents? Is that need for solitude from nature, nurture, or a combination of both? I do know that if left alone for too long, the contentment can evolve into loneliness, so there’s definitely a balancing act. And there’s something specific that happens when I am alone in nature, or when I even see images of people alone in nature. Such images can provide moments of calm for me, especially when a figure is dwarfed in size by a panorama or massive landscape view. For whatever reason, I feel soothed by the being made to feel small & insignificant, as I’m more mindful that whatever stress or life hurdle I’m facing could be seen from another perspective.

The angle, lens, distance, illumination–all these things can dramatically shift the viewpoint.

As a child in New Hampshire, walking home from school through the woods provided me with regular periods of time spent in nature alone. You could say I was a bit of a dilly-dallier, taking my time to imagine stories, often fantastical since I loved fairy tales, in which I would find adventure.  When I lived in Rockport, Massachusetts, I loved the walks to the Headlands (as you may have read from other blog posts I’ve shared) which allowed me similar periods of solitude & whimsy, dreaming spaces where my lively interior life common to introvert children glowed brightly in Technicolor. The quiet offered by these walks enhanced the experience, listening to the wind & its effect on waves & the shoreline or leaves & trees in the woods.

Could part of the romanticizing of youth be that adult valuing of those small gifts of unplanned time when those of us as kids were allowed to ramble, mosey, poke through, wander, discover, seek out, & explore?

When I think of the “Romancing the Alone,” I think of the ways in which humans have long idealized solitude in undiscovered, undeveloped natural settings. The painting below, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, certainly surfaces in my mind. One can definitely find a strong recurring theme of the hermit in nature within Romantic works–novels, essays, art, music, & design elements. I remember well how Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about Pa’s need to periodically move to a new place when neighbors started to approach too closely to where they were living–& that was a ridiculous distance in modern conception measured in tens of miles. Looking back, Pa explained that the wild animals wouldn’t stay on in woods where too many people lived–which made sustaining food supplies a reasonable concern. But little did I think about that as a kid in the way I do now. Today, fear creeps in when I explore too deeply into the woods, as people have become too dependent on things like hospitals, foodstuffs in stores, or even just running, drinkable water.

How is it that the nature that inspired so many has become foreign or dangerous to the contemporary imagination? Films like Everest & Into the Wild, & shows like The Terror or even Alone, demonstrate the kinds of fear, that sublime feeling of beauty & terror at the same time, which the lone person in nature can inspire in today’s minds.

And so these are things I think about quite often, especially as someone who lives in the humanities in what I do & think about for the future. Perhaps it’s the bustle, the population growth, the consumption of resources, the pace of modern work, the increasing automation & expansion of technology–all these things & more–that causes introvert academic folk & writers to prioritize & treasure alone time in nature? Of course, this can be subjective, as I know many introverts who grew up in urban environments may not see expansive vistas of nature in a similar light. For others, a nook in a coffee shop or a granite park bench can offer solitude among the masses, where the expansive view becomes the human landscape, the being awed by something massive might stem from human-made buildings or architecture or art installations or streams of traffic. Urban sounds can replace the natural sounds of wind & waves crashing with the hum of cars, sirens, & crosswalk audio signals.

The idea or concept is the same, but the landscape of the future shifts from organic or natural things like trees, woods, grasses & mosses, & sunshine, to human-made ones like metal, glass, synthetic plastics, & artificial lighting.

And so you’ll notice a pattern to the images curated from the open source Pixabay for this reverie. (I use my own photography for more specific pieces tied to personal places, people, pets, or settings, & for more academic pieces I’ll use open-access images.) You’ll see that the focus of the pictures are not just the lone humans–often a silhouette or androgynous or a back or outline. Rather, the human figures function within that bigger setting of nature. It’s that interplay of the individual within the landscape–a passive observer or witness–which causes the tension or composition of artistic interest for the eye. And there’s a sense of inner peace gained from gazing upon the images. That feeling would shift or alter with another person present. The intimacy found in that lone relationship between the human & the natural setting, being near something but not necessarily of that something, would fundamentally change. And for the viewer that voyeuristic experience of seeing those intensely private moments that can evoke such deep emotions or revelations would be lost.

A romance of being alone in a space that allows that spark of profound feeling to catch fire–that is also what becomes “Romantic” in the artistic sense. Can that ever be truly shared? I don’t know that I have the answer.