Expert answer:5 to 6 pages needed, please see attached doc as we
Expert answer:Your essay should make specific reference to all the articles in this reading set. In addition, define and employ key terms that seem to be central to the arguments of your sources and, therefore, to your argument as well. Among these key terms are: Unity/fusion; spiritual; self-formation; authenticity; creativity; solitude; loneliness; negative and positive freedom; cognitive structures; indirect or substitutive engagement.
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Question for the January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Seeking Solitude
(Due by 4:00 PM on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, at CC-01-1313)
Question:
Barbour concludes that “Solitude at its best – when it realizes its fullest ethical and spiritual value – is not
oriented toward escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it, as made possible by
disengagement from ordinary social interactions.” He also notes that “Solitude is a return to the self, but … it
may also be a return to what is most important in one’s life and an encounter with sources of meaning and truth
beyond oneself.” (3) Long and Averill also “identify … the kinds of benefits that solitude provides, and the
environmental settings, personality traits, and developmental capabilities that help mediate those benefits” (4).
In what ways do Grumbach and/or Byrd seem to be experiencing the spiritual and/or psychological benefits
and deficits of solitude? Based on your analysis, what can you add to, or how might you contradict the
conclusions of Barbour and of Long & Averill about the psychological and spiritual value of solitude?
Your essay should make specific reference to all the articles in this reading set. In addition, define and
employ key terms that seem to be central to the arguments of your sources and, therefore, to your argument as
well. Among these key terms are: Unity/fusion; spiritual; self-formation; authenticity; creativity; solitude;
loneliness; negative and positive freedom; cognitive structures; indirect or substitutive engagement.
Note:
It is essential that you include in your essay specific references to the Barbour article, the Long & Averill
article, and Grumbach’s or Byrd’s memoir. (Or you may use both memoirs.) You must attribute any material
that you summarize, quote, or paraphrase to its source. Base your essay on the information contained in the
set of readings, not on your own experience, on outside readings, or on courses you have taken.
Plagiarism in a portfolio, whether it is in the new essay or in one of the supporting essays, will be treated in the
manner as outlined in the Student Code of Conduct, which can be downloaded in PDF form at:
https://www.umb.edu/life_on_campus/policies/community/code
The consequences of violating these policies are serious and may include suspension or expulsion.
January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Question
University of Massachusetts at Boston
Colleges of Education and Human Development, Honors, Liberal Arts,
Nursing and Health Sciences, Public and Community Service, Science and Mathematics, and the
School for the Environment
January 2018 Writing Proficiency Evaluation (WPE): Portfolio
Portfolio Reading Set: Seeking Solitude
The portfolio is due on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, no later than 4:00PM
In the Writing Proficiency Office, CC-1-1300
Table of Contents
1. Barbour, John. “A View from Religious Studies: Solitude and Spirituality.” In The Handbook Of Solitude. Robert J.
Coplan and Julie C. Bowker, eds. UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014.
2. Christopher, and James Averill. “Solitude: An Exploration of Benefits of Being Alone.” Journal for the Theory of
Social Behaviour 33:1
3. Grumbach, Doris. Fifty Days of Solitude. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994
4. Byrd, Robert E. Alone. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1938.
Articles reprinted with permission
Notes:
Your portfolio must contain an essay that is at least five (5) full pages (double spaced in 10 or 12
point type) that answers the question above; at least 15 pages of supporting papers, each one attached
to a completed Certification Form; and a completed Portfolio Submission Form.
The exception to the 15-page supporting-paper requirement only applies to a new transfer student. If, and
only if you are a transfer student who has not yet completed your second semester, then you may submit a
portfolio that has either two or three supporting papers totaling 10 full pages.
January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Table of Contents
A View from Religious Studies: Solitude and Spirituality
By John D. Barbour1
Secular Solitaries as Spiritual Seekers
Solitude has been important in a variety of ways to modern individuals who have a negative, strained, or ambiguous
relationship to a religious community yet consider themselves to be searching for religious or spiritual meaning. Among
scholars of religion, the term spiritual is notoriously difficult to define. Within recognized religious traditions, it may refer
to an intense inward focus on the life of prayer and vision and to the relative neglect of details of ordinary social life and
be closely associated with mysticism. It is usually understood as the personal and individual aspects of religion, especially
feelings of joy or serenity, appreciative awareness, openness to and acceptance of reality, a sense of life’s goodness and
unity, self-surrender, healing, and belief that one is in contact with the fundamental sources of life. Particular religious
traditions shape the ways these experiences are understood. Yet, especially in the modern world, some individuals
understand themselves as searching outside their formative tradition, or indeed any organized religious community, for
God or whatever they believe to be worthy of ultimate loyalty and trust. Seeking becomes more important than finding,
and spiritual but not religious persons seem to share the view that every individual must find his or her own path, rather
than proposing a single model of belief or affiliation for all. There is a natural affinity between this individualistic
conception of spirituality and experiences of solitude that confirm unique or distinctive perceptions of ultimate reality.
In an interpretation of how autobiographers have presented the value of solitude in their own lives, I proposed five basic
ways that writers have affirmed aloneness as a spiritual value. One value sought in solitude is a sense of deeper
connection with the natural world. For some people, solitude seems to be necessary to apprehend fully the beauty and
power of the natural world. The Romantic poets perceived nature’s spiritual meaning in solitary excursions, as when
Wordsworth, in “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” referred to “that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude.” Thoreau’s
Walden is the fountainhead of the American tradition of nature writing, which includes writers such as John Muir, Aldo
Leopold, Annie Dillard, and Edward Abbey. These writers describe not only details of the natural world but the effect
upon consciousness of periods of dwelling alone in their environment. Awareness of boundaries between oneself and the
world can dissolve when one is lost in contemplation of flowing water, expansive prairie, or desert vista. Such moments
of identification, merging, or communion with the world are, at least for persons inclined to solitude, much more difficult
to attain when they must attend to other people’s reactions. One would never know from Annie Dillard’s account of
Tinker Creek that southwestern Virginia is a well-populated agricultural area or that her life was shared in any way with
other human beings. She cultivates the role of solitary, saying that her ecstatic responses to nature’s blood, guts, and
beauty make her “no longer quite fit for company.” She places herself in the tradition of the fifth-century Egyptian desert
hermits, quoting one who tells a disciple, “Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” (p. 264).
Dillard doesn’t sit in a cell, but near a particular stream, where she practices attentive and self-disciplined alertness, the
stilling of the ego that makes possible moments of direct perception and a sense of unity or fusion with the world. For this
kind of writer, representing many people who do not write personal memoirs, solitude in the natural world is the occasion
and inspiration for a distinctive spiritual concern with attunement to the natural world.
A second form of solitude related to spirituality has its origin in periods of aloneness in response to loss, trauma, or
suffering, when a person sequesters himself in order to heal physical or psychic wounds. Solitude is a part of the
mourning process in certain religions and cultures. For secular individuals, too, coming to terms with bereavement may
require not only the support of relatives and friends but immersion in the emotions of grief and sorrow and confrontation
with the reality of loss, separation, and ending. Solitude offers retreat from the pressures of ordinary social engagement, a
refuge or respite from interaction that allows healing powers within the self and in the natural environment to restore wellbeing.
Works of autobiographical writing that portray solitude’s healing powers include Petrarch’s De Vita Solitaria, Rousseau’s
Reveries of the solitary walker, Peter Matthiessen’s The snow leopard, and May Sarton’s Journal of a solitude. These
authors portray the healing that they found in solitude as a crucial spiritual experience bringing discernment of a pattern
and meaning in life, connection with ultimate powers, and a sense of being reintegrated into the cycles of nature. They
1
John D. Barbour teaches in the Department of Religion, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN.
January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Page 1 of 22
may understand solitude’s benevolent power in very different ways, as based on God’s grace, the restorative influence of
the natural world, or the mysterious recuperative capacities of the human psyche.
A third variety of solitude linked to spiritual meaning is solo adventure, for instance, travelers who have kayaked around
Lake Superior, hiked through the Grand Canyon, sailed around the world, crossed the Sahara Desert, climbed a
formidable mountain, wandered through a jungle, or survived on an open lifeboat. Unlike stay-at-home hermits, these
adventurous wanderers search for a test that will bring out their resourcefulness and strength of character. Solo
adventurers embrace the dangerous aspects of solitude along with other risky aspects of wilderness travel. The
concentrated attention involved in taking calculated risks can be an exhilarating experience. Adventurers seek a
demanding test to find out what sort of person they are, and what they learn in their journey seems to them of ultimate
importance, the deepest truth they know. A sense of immense gratitude simply to be alive may flow from relief at having
survived an ordeal…
A fourth spiritual meaning of aloneness is that, for certain individuals, solitude is necessary to do their creative work.
Anthony Storr describes the importance of solitude for writers and thinkers including Descartes, Newton, Locke, Pascal,
Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Kaf ka, Trollope, Kipling, Henry James,
Rilke, and Jung. Building on Donald Winnicott’s work, Storr describes “the capacity to be alone” as a crucial basis of
creativity: “The capacity to be alone thus becomes linked with self-discovery and self-realization; with becoming aware of
one’s deepest needs, feelings, and impulses” (Storr, 1988, p. 21). The imperative that some people feel to produce creative
work is for them tantamount to a religious vocation or spiritual calling. The process of creating artistic or intellectual
work, with its struggles, demands, and exhilaration, is for such persons a spiritual practice, a discipline of attention, focus,
and self-transcendence in the service of a vision of truth and beauty.
A fifth linkage between solitude and modern spirituality is certain conceptions of self-formation. Some people understand
solitude as a crucial condition for the formation of a distinct self, a coherent personal identity. Such individuals feel that
other people’s demands, expectations, and constraints inhibit the discovery of their own deepest needs and desires. Lionel
Trilling and Charles Taylor have discussed how the ideal of authenticity shapes the modern Western concept of identity.
For Trilling, authenticity is an ideal of personal being that necessarily involves opposition to what is socially expected and
approved. He links authenticity to Romantic ideals of subjectivity, feeling, and self-determining freedom. Being true to
oneself seems to require rebellion, a break with conformity, and freedom from established moral standards: “Authenticity
is implicitly a polemical concept, fulfilling its nature by dealing aggressively with received and habitual opinion”
(Trilling, 1991, p. 94).
Similarly, Charles Taylor interprets authenticity in terms of the moral ideal of being true to oneself by turning inward
rather than shaping one’s life according to models from outside society. If one’s truest self is neglected when one depends
on others, then turning away from them and recovering contact with what Taylor calls “the sources of the self” within one
is necessary for any person who desires to live an authentic life. In addition to authenticity, many related ideals in the
modern, secular West, such as autonomy, inwardness, liberty of conscience, emotional expressivity, and self-reliance,
suggest a crucial role for solitude in the formation of individual identity.
We can take Nietzsche as an extreme but illuminating representative of the myth or ideology of the solitary genius, the
ideas that a worthwhile life is bound up with creativity and originality and that heroic creators stand apart from all
influences or at least outgrow them. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche calls what he considers his masterpiece, Thus spoke
Zarathustra, “a dithyramb on solitude” (Nietzsche, 1969, p. 234). Like a Greek choric hymn, his work celebrates what he
takes to be the source of life: solitude, the source of human creativity and the will to power. Nietzsche’s loneliness and
pride in his capacity to endure isolation emerge in his rapt descriptions of Zarathustra’s lofty remoteness from others,
including his disciples. For Nietzsche – and, I would argue, for many others who might disavow other aspects of his
philosophy – solitude is necessary not only to work creatively but also to form an authentic self and to live a worthwhile
life.
Commitment to the task of self-formation is for many modern thinkers and artists the highest ethical and spiritual calling.
The goal of choosing one’s own values – alone, in rebellion against a morally bankrupt bourgeois society – has seemed to
such people the highest ethical demand and the noblest spiritual path.
January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Page 2 of 22
As another example of this tendency, consider Carl Jung, whose autobiographical Memories, dreams, reflections shows
the crucial role of a period of solitude in the process of individuation in his life. After his break with Freud in 1913, Jung
went through a period of disorientation that he said was close to a psychosis. For the next 8 years, he published very little,
focusing on recording dreams, fantasies, and visions. He sequestered himself, cultivated childhood memories, and played
with building blocks and stones. During this period of intense introspection, he gathered the psychological material on
which he based his theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Memories, dreams, reflections describes not
only the source of Jung’s theories but, as he puts it in the Prologue, his personal myth. Central to Jung’s personal myth is
the image of himself as a solitary genius set apart from others. Comparing himself to his 12-year-old self, he says: “Today
as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not
even want to know” (Jung, 1965, p. 42). He presents the capacity for solitude as the key to both his original psychological
ideas and his own individuation, his development into a unique self. I take Nietzsche and Jung as representative of many
other secular seekers who describe withdrawal from involvement with others as enabling contact with deep sources of the
self, life-enhancing dimensions of reality, and spiritual aspirations easily dissipated by normal social interactions.
Conclusions
Just as solitude has its biased detractors, some of its advocates, both religious and secular, are unbalanced in their refusal
to consider how solitude can be integrated with social concerns. Wisdom about solitude involves understanding both the
spiritual value of experiences of aloneness and the dangers when solitary pursuits are severed from the relationships,
social activities, and contexts that give solitude much of its meaning and value.
Solitude helps certain people to understand and feel connected to the fundamental sources of meaning and value in their
lives. Alone, they may better study ancient texts, examine conscience, discern God’s will, create works of art or literature,
appreciate the natural world, or forge a distinctive identity. Some people explicitly correlate their view of solitude with a
conception of God and find a religious community that supports their aloneness, while secular solitaries do not link their
ultimate values to the divine or an institutional tradition. The spiritual but not religious person usually seeks contact with
transcendent meaning, but does not affiliate with a community, and often understands experiences of solitude as
confirming his/her sense of estrangement or detachment from the official institutions of religion. Sometimes aloneness is
primarily an escape from the negative aspects of social existence: the boredom, conflict, or anxious striving to please that
drain one’s energy and spiritual vitality. More positively, solitude allows a person to focus on some dimension of reality
that is better appreciated or engaged when one is not distracted by the need to attend to others. Thus, solitude can be both
a retreat from unwanted social interactions and a commitment to positive values and dimensions of reality that are more
fully experienced alone.
From some points of view, the very idea of spiritual or religious solitude is an oxymoron. If religion is understood as a
matter of self-transcendence or commitment to a religious community, then aloneness seems the antithesis of genuine
spiritual development. This perspective however fails to grasp how the practice a certain kind of attentiveness that they
cannot achieve when distracted by the presence of other people. For these individuals, solitude is a necessary condition of
meditative awareness or full concentration on something beyond the self that connects them with the world and often with
what they believe to be sacred, divine, holy, or most valuable. Solitude at its best – when it realizes its fullest ethical and
spiritual value – is not oriented toward escaping the world, but toward a different kind of participation in it, as made
possible by disengagement from ordinary social interactions. Solitude is a return to the self, but it is not necessarily
narcissistic; it may also be a return to what is most important in one’s life and an encounter with sources of meaning and
truth beyond oneself.
Solitude: An Exploration of Benefits of Being Alone
By Christopher R. Long and James R. Averill2
In her autobiography, the French writer Colette wrote, “There are days when solitude is heady wine that intoxicates you,
others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall” (p.
2
Christopher R. Long and James R. Averill teach in the Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
January 2018 WPE Portfolio Reading Set
Page 3 of 22
139). As her observation suggests, solitude can be experienced as positive— like a “heady wine” or a healthful “bitter
tonic”—or as negative, like beating one’s “head against the wall.” Often, negative solitude experiences are characterized
by lonel …
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