Going Solo

Living in a city, you learn to filter out background noise. There’s a constant din of cars passing, doors closing, planes passing, computers humming. We dorm dwellers are especially adept at tuning it out. Richard Yates has a great passage about the sound of the city in a story called “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired.” He writes that all the “little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it’s so faint—so very, very faint—that you can’t hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.”

But listening for the background is not something that we do very well. In fact, we tend to do everything in our power to increase the amount of background noise in our lives. We listen to music on headphones as we walk to class; we read as we eat meals; and we talk on the cell phone as we drive to work, sipping scalding hot coffee all the while—this, as it happens, is just plain dangerous. I’m as much a culprit as the next guy—right now, I’m drinking a cup of cocoa (with marshmallows) and listening to music (Dismemberment Plan’s “Change”) as I write.

I suspect that if we turned off all the extraneous noises in our lives, there would be something kind of frightening about the silence that remained. After all, we’d be left with nothing but our thoughts, echoing noisily in the caverns of our oversized craniums. And yet, this is exactly the sort of thing that religious folk and philosophers have always done. Prayer, meditation, and deep self-reflection require a stillness that is hard to find amidst the hubbub of the world outside. That’s probably why monks escaped to monasteries and philosophers shut themselves up in studies with big armchairs.

It is ironic that a culture of reflection is almost entirely absent at Harvard, where smart kids run around reading philosophical treatises and studying theoretical physics. For such thoughtful students, the type who would seem to require moments of solitary reflection, we are rarely alone. And when we are alone, we almost never spend the time reflectively. Assuming that eating a solitary meal in the dining hall is something that only a social misfit would do, we bring along a newspaper or a book “just in case” we find ourselves without dining partners. The lonely breakfast is acceptable, especially if it’s before 9 a.m. But dinner? Unthinkable. The few solo dinners I’ve survived have been truly awkward. It’s the sort of situation where you get the feeling that everyone’s looking at you (“See that guy? He’s eating alone. That’s so sad….Do you think he has any friends?”).

The collegiate stigma against solitude is surprisingly strong, and college life often seems purposefully structured to give social interaction some inherently privileged status. Many of us come from homes where we had our own rooms. Hell, many of us were loners in high school. But as first-years, we are thrust into common living spaces. From that moment on, we are constantly in the company of other people—in the dorm, in our dining halls, in class, next to us on the treadmills. Unless you score a single in Cabot and embrace a hermitic lifestyle, chances are that the shower is your only guaranteed source of privacy throughout college. (As a rower, I don’t often enjoy even that small dose of seclusion: Newell Boathouse’s communal shower is the norm for me.)

But isn’t this degree of sociability a good thing? After all, we are constantly told that 20 years hence, we will remember our friendships and dinner conversations more than our classes or our grades. They have a point: At what other point in our lives are we going to enjoy the constant company of so many bright and exciting friends? And there are also legitimate health reasons for limiting privacy. Given Harvard’s stressful academic environment, it’s extremely important to develop a network of supportive friends who would be able to notice the signs of depression or anxiety early enough to prevent serious mental illness or personal tragedy.

I’m not against the social lifestyle. But an active social life and a reflective mental life are not mutually exclusive. The problem is not only that we’re rarely alone. It’s also that when we are alone, we tend to multitask our lives into insignificance. For example, no one would go to the opera and bring a book to read during the performance. Even if your mind wanders, you are expected to direct your full attention to the action. Why don’t we commit the same level of attention to recorded music, or food? Seems to me that as soon as you start playing music in the background, it becomes elevator music—glorified muzak.

And that’s what I mean when I say that we are multitasking our lives into insignificance. When we stop treating each activity as a part of the foreground and instead push them into the background, they become nothing more than noise. Can you really taste your eggs when you’re also trying to read Max Weber as you masticate?

I don’t think that we should all chuck our Walkmans into the garbage or stop bringing the paper to breakfast. I don’t even think that we all have to start meditating, although finding physical solitude is probably an important first step in developing a reflective attitude. But let’s start small: Maybe it would do us some good to practice doing one thing at a time for a change. Like putting Miles on the stereo and just listening. Or, for the truly bold, going to the dining hall and just chewing.

Christopher W. Snyder ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.