Maslow believed that self-actualization and creativity are proba-bly the same process.7 Although his view has been disputed, it is well known that to be creative, people must have periods of being alone, away from distraction. This time alone allows you to concentrate, to reflect, to generate ideas. As Maslow noted, "[the] ability to become
SOLITUDE AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION 2 3 1
lost in the present seems to be a sine qua non for creativeness of any kind."8 When you are alone, you drop your mask, your efforts to please or to flatter or to impress others. Without an audience, you stop being an actor and can be yourself, with your unique visions.
Anthony Storr's fine book Solitude is a thorough investigation of solitude and the creative process.
Social interactions distract us from this solitude. We are for-ever enticed by the immediate gratifications to be found in our so-cial surroundings; we are continually tempted to say and do the socially desirable thing and even to feel the socially desirable emo-tion. Independence is nurtured in solitude. As Ralph Waldo Emer-son so eloquently put it: "[The] voices which we hear in solitude . . . grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."9
Creativity requires resisting these temptations and preserving a strong measure of independence. When we are with others, it is expedient to conform; when we are with ourselves, it is more natural to be independent. Of course, the clever among us can do both. "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."10
It is not surprising that many artists have chosen to spend extensive periods alone. To defend their solitude and independence, some have chosen, for example, not to have families. As was asserted centuries ago by Francis Bacon, "he that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enter-prises. . . . Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public."11
For many artists being alone may simply be essential to their creative process.
Vincent Van Gogh certainly believed that his self-isolation was essential: "If at present I am worth something, it is because I am alone, and I hate fools, the impotent, cynics, idiotic and stupid
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fers."12 Van Gogh asserted that his shocking appearance, poverty, and neglect were "a good way to assure the solitude necessary for concentrating on whatever study preoccupies one."13 We may sus-pect that this statement was partly a rationalization. It is difficult for us at this time to tell which came first for Van Gogh, the solitude or the antisocial behaviors. Yet Van Gogh believed that his art was essential to his mental health—it was the only thing that allowed him to work through his periodic deep depressions. And if solitude was necessary for his art, it was necessary for his life: "I feel inexpressi-bly melancholic without my work to distract me. . . . / must forget myself in my work, otherwise it will crush me."14 Van Gogh also appreciated the heightening effects that solitude could have on him:
"It is true that there may be moments when one becomes absent-minded, somewhat visionary; some become too absent-absent-minded, too visionary. This is perhaps the case with me, but it is my own fault . . . but one overcomes this. The dreamer sometimes falls into the well, but is said to get out of it afterward."15
Other artists have had less dramatic, but nevertheless central, experiences with solitude. Some have learned early in life what most of us learn only later: that they are comfortable alone. As a boy entering private school, novelist Louis Auchincloss faced a difficult period of hazing. This period of suffering taught him to appreciate the peace of being alone. In his autobiography, he wrote: "My persecu-tion ebbed at last, and I experienced the bliss of simple neglect. Even today I find it a bit difficult to comprehend the modern terror of loneliness."16 Artist Georgia O'Keeffe also knew the value of solitude quite early. As a young woman, O'Keeffe spent a year alone painting.
In later years she expressed the opinion that if she were not able to spend such a period alone doing her own work, "I wouldn't be worth very much, would I?"17
It is important to point out that though it is creative, such solitude is not necessarily joyful and "happy." Hard work, even if it is self-actualizing work, can be fatiguing. It can be emotionally drain-ing and sometimes tedious. Workdrain-ing through the solitude, stickdrain-ing with the task, may be one of life's most difficult achievements. Nov-elist Thomas Wolfe's description of the loneliness of creativity is
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compelling, chastening, and awe inspiring. But, as here excerpted from Jeremy Seabrook's book Loneliness, it is also wonderfully alive:
Hideous doubt, despair, and dark confusion of the soul a lonely man must know, for he is united to no image save that which he creates himself, he is bolstered by no other knowledge save that which he can gather for himself with the vision of his own eyes and brain. He is sustained and cheered and aided by no party, he is given comfort by no creed, he has no faith in him except his own. And often that faith deserts him, leaving him shaken and filled with impotence. And then it seems to him that his life has come to nothing, that he is ruined, lost, and broken past redemption, and that morning—bright, shining morning, with its promise of new beginnings—will never come upon the earth again as it did once.
He knows that dark time is flowing by him like a river. The huge, dark wall of loneliness is around him now. It encloses and presses in upon him, and he cannot escape. And the cancerous plant of memory is feeding at his entrails, recalling hundreds of forgotten faces and ten thousand vanished days, until all life seems as strange and insubstantial as a dream. Time flows by him like a river, and he waits in his little room like a creature held captive by an evil spell. And he will hear, far off, the murmurous drone of the great earth, and feel that he has been forgotten, that his powers are wasting from him while the river flows, and that all his life has come to nothing. He feels that his strength is gone, his power withered, while he sits there drugged and fettered in the prison of his loneliness.
Then suddenly, one day, for no apparent reason, his faith and his belief in life will come back to him in a tidal flood. It will rise up in him with a jubilant and invincible power, bursting a window in the world's great wall and restoring everything to shapes of deathless brightness.
Made miraculously whole and secure in himself, he will plunge once more into the triumphant labor of creation. All his old strength is his again; he knows what he knows, he is what he is, he has found what he has found. And he will say the truth that is in him, speak it even though the whole world deny it, affirm it though a million men cry out that it is false.18
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To remove oneself from life—from easy laughter and festivity and some kinds of love—is for some a true sacrifice. But it is in this time away and alone that a person finds truth and possibly, if he or she is blessed, even new truth for humanity. It is also in this time away that the person discovers the conviction to speak the truth.
Artists understand this sort of necessary intensity. Nobel prize-win-ning novelist Herman Hesse described his own agonies in self-explo-ration:
I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmoni-ous as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams—like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.19
The experience of we mere ordinary self-actualizers is similar to the experience of the fine artists and the literary geniuses, if less articulately expressed. The joy and the pain of creativity are valuable for us all. We all need to provide for ourselves time away from distractions, time away from the influences of others, time to allow ourselves to escape our impulse to conform. We all need to under-stand that this experience will be difficult, though perhaps not as painful as the creative writers would have us believe, and that it will be worthwhile.
It is in this way that you can be maximally self-actualizing. In your daily life, pursuing your creativity will help you to recapture the spirit of your childhood—the curiosity, wonderment, and playful-ness—that through your years of education, work, and adjustment to society have been forgotten. Indulging in your own creativity can be an antidote to the alienation that you experience in the institutions in which you work. Creativity is also the key to personal effectiveness in anything that you do: People who are in touch with their own creativity become increasingly centered, whole, and purposeful. They discover their own meanings; they know what they want; they can pursue their goals with focus and abandon.
Poets are often said to be less alienated than are others,
includ-SOLITUDE AND SELF-ACTUALIZATION 2 3 5
ing other artists, in our modern world. Writing alone, they are com-pelled to face their loneliness and their selves. More essentially, though, their tool of human self-expression is unique. Language is a soothing symbolic connection with one's own experience and with humanity. No other tool—not shapes or forms or mathematics—has the human essence that language contains. No doubt, the large amount of creativity expressed in ordinary lives, especially through poetry, is linked to our need to discover meaning. For many of us, our poems represent our life myths, our intellectual and emotional structuring of experience. Though relatively few Americans publish poetry, millions write it. In our solitude, we find the words that connect us with ourselves and with the contexts of our lives and that allow us to find solace and joy in our continual self-actualizing.
Americans particularly need the solace that is found in creativity.
Yehudi A. Cohen, co-editor of an excellent collection of writings on loneliness that I have often cited here, argues that American society is a creative society, in part, because of people's freedom to choose solitude. Although we Americans practice a great deal of together-ness, togetherness is even more extreme in some other societies, where people are never alone. Our privilege in being alone, however, also creates the need to make sense of that solitude.
No society has gone as far as our own in breaking down the barriers among different ethnic, religious, and other groups.
Whereas this phenomenon is often viewed as negative—as a
"breakdown" of ties with kin and other groups—it can also be viewed as positive: It is true that we have been enormously cre-ative as a society. "Relcre-ative to the total span of time during which ideas have been recorded, the intellectual ferment of American soci-ety has been staggering."20 Our ideas come not only from scien-tists, but from businesspeople, historians, inventors, lawyers, cler-gymen, and dissidents who fit no categories. On the one hand, these 'deas have been possible because of a political climate in which new 'deas may be expressed without fear of political reprisals. Just as
^portant, these ideas have been possible because of "a strong Measure of alienation, anomie, a sense of isolation, of loneliness."21
ft seems that along with our independence, we have taken on the
responsibility to develop our own creativity.
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Out of our independence must also spring the responsibility to develop a philosophy of solitude. The belief that tight communal forms, such as kinship, religious, and ethnic ties, are entirely positive forces in a society is sentimental. People in such groups tend to watch each other constantly for aberrations; pressure to conform in both thought and deed are high. Innovators remove themselves and delib-erately alienate themselves from such groupthink. They commit themselves to being alone and to thinking independently. Such a mode of individuality has historically been possible in this country, beginning with the Puritan dissidents who left their religiously based communities and continuing into modern times. In the United States, diversity is tolerated as nowhere else in the world. While the cost to the individual is often an increased sense of social alienation, for many the trade-off is worthwhile. Self-actualizers balance the ideal of com-munity with their own personhood and creativity.
In giving up our traditional communal structures, we may be opting for anomie. Yet it is also possible that feelings like anomie, despair, and loneliness are not necessary accompaniments to our individual freedom. Though these negative feelings certainly occur during the creative process, they need not be overwhelming or even enormously influential in the life of a self-actualizing person. Through positive solitude, individuals may be able to create a new social structure, a community of self-actualizing individuals that reduces the negatives and instead soothes and connects and satisfies. Perhaps we do not require the strictures of communal life and perhaps the loneli-ness can also be avoided. Perhaps we can structure the creativity—
the living—by ourselves. We are a culture searching for meaning, and we may yet have time to find it.