Written by David Vincent

When the poet John Donne was struck down by a sudden infection in 1623 he immediately found himself alone – even his doctors deserted him. The experience, which only lasted a week, was intolerable. He later wrote: “As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude.”

It’s hard to believe now, but until relatively recently, solitude – or the experience of being alone for significant periods of time – was treated with a mixture of fear and respect. It tended to be restricted to enclosed religious orders and was thus a privileged experience of a male elite. Change was only set in motion by the Reformation and the Enlightenment, when the ideologies of humanism and realism took hold and solitude slowly became something that anyone could acceptably seek from time to time. Most people in the West are now used to some regular form of solitude – but the reality of lockdown is making this experience far more extreme.

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David Vincent’s book A History of Solitude will be published by Polity on April 24.

About The Author

David Vincent, Professor of Social History, The Open University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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