On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about -173°C) at night. But these unique nooks, which are most likely collapsed lava tubes, are a cozy 63°F (17°C) inside — the feeling-tone of a crisp autumn day in Brooklyn, where I live. Images from the LRO suggested that these pits might unfold into caves that would make perfect sites for lunar exploration — campsites with a stable temperature, more protected from cosmic rays, solar radiation, and micrometeorites.
There is something poetic in knowing that we evolved in caves and might one day inhabit caves on another celestial body, having invented the means to get there with the imagination that bloomed over millions of years in the lonely bone cave of the mind.
There is also something poetic in knowing that as we fantasize about leaving for the Moon, the Moon is leaving us.
The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this disquieting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. Nobody believed him — the Moon looked so steady, so unlosable. It took a quarter millennium for his theory to be vindicated: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the lunar surface and when laser beams were beamed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year — more than half the rate at which a child grows.
The Moon is leaving us because of the gravitational conversation between it and the Earth: the ocean tides. The drag they cause slows down the planet’s spin rate. Because gravity binds the Moon and the Earth, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us.
We know this thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — the revelation that space is not flat, time is not absolute, and spacetime is a single fabric along the curvature of which everything, including light, moves.
I thought of Einstein, who at sixteen, lonely and introverted, began wondering about the nature of the universe by imagining himself chasing a beam of light through outer space; I thought of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, also lonely and also dedicated to the light, who at the same time was formulating his general theory of love as “two solitudes that protect, border, and greet each other.” And I thought about how love is simply the solitary light between people, neither partitioned nor merged but shared, to light up the sliver of spacetime we have each been allotted before returning our borrowed stardust to the universe.
Somehow it all felt like a children’s book that didn’t yet exist. So I wrote it, having always believed that every good children’s book is a work of philosophy in disguise, a field guide to the mystery we are a part of and the mystery we are — in the language of children, which is the language of curiosity and unselfconscious sincerity, such books speak the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us by asking the simplest, deepest questions to help us understanding the world and understanding ourselves so that we may be more fully alive.
By one of those wrinkles in time and chance that we call luck, shortly after I sent the manuscript to my friend Claudia at Enchanted Lion Books, I received a lovely note from a stranger named Sarah Jacoby in response to my essay about Margaret Wise Brown’s complicated love with Michael Strange. Sarah told me that she too had fallen under the spell of their singular love while illustrating a picture-book biography of Margaret. I ordered it and, enchanted by Sarah’s soulful watercolors and tender creatures, spontaneously invited her to illustrate my lunar story of loneliness and love on nothing more than an instinct of creative kinship. She must have felt it too because, felicitously, she said “yes.”
It was on a Tuesday in July that Re woke up feeling like the loneliest creature on Earth and decided to go live in the coziest place on the Moon.
At exactly 7:26 — a pretty number, a pretty hour — Re mounted a beam of light and sailed into space.
It took exactly 1.255 seconds, because light travels at the speed of dreams, to land exactly where Re wanted to land.
Across Sarah’s enchanted spacescapes, Re has a surprising encounter that takes the story to where it always wanted to go — a reckoning with how to bear our loneliness and what it really means to love.
We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise.
Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities of attachment and individuation, the complexities that shaped how we move through the world, how we suffer, how we love.
But while Hemingway was right that “no one you love is ever dead,” something very real does die when a parent does — a biological tether, a memory storehouse, a fantasy of what the relationship could have been. And even if you know what to do when your parents are dying, even if you do do it with the utmost grace, nothing can brace you for the impact of that loss when it does come.
Still, there are ways you can move through it — things to hold in awareness, subtle kindnesses, small graces with the grief process — that can salve the pain.
After my mother died I received a letter from a friend in Chicago, a former Maryknoll priest, who precisely intuited what I felt. The death of a parent, he wrote, “despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean’s bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections.”
Another, soulful and imaginative, comes from a team of young animators from French animation academy Gobelins:
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time.
To be truly alive is to inhabit the moment not as a future memory of experience, not as a projection of the past, but as a meteor of actuality.
That is what art historian George Kubler (July 26, 1912–October 3, 1996) explores in a fragment of his wholly revelatory 1962 book The Shape of Time (public library).
Observing that “time, like mind, is not knowable as such,” that “we know time only indirectly by what happens in it: by observing change and permanence; by marking the succession of events among stable settings; and by noting the contrast of varying rates of change,” he writes:
Actuality is when the lighthouse is dark between flashes: it is the instant between the ticks of the watch: it is a void interval slipping forever through time: the rupture between past and future: the gap at the poles of the revolving magnetic field, infinitesimally small but ultimately real. It is the interchronic pause when nothing is happening. It is the void between events.
Yet the instant of actuality is all we ever can know directly. The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers. These signals are like kinetic energy stored until the moment of notice when the mass descends along some portion of its path to the center of the gravitational system… These old signals are not actual. The nature of a signal is that its message is neither here nor now, but there and then. If it is a signal it is a past action, no longer embraced by the “now” of present being. The perception of a signal happens “now,” but its impulse and its transmission happened “then.” In any event, the present instant is the plane upon which the signals of all being are projected. No other plane of duration gathers us up universally into the same instant of becoming.
We can only ever know actuality through the creaturely sensorium in the cocoon of consciousness suspended from the dying twig of the living moment, and yet part of the price of consciousness is that, in blessing us with the capacity for prospection and retorspection, it has cursed us with the compulsion to evict ourselves from the moment. Kubler writes:
To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans, the instant of actuality must seem far less brief. The rule of instinct is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with circuits that close and open unselectively. In this duration choice is so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of human experience. The ruminant or the insect must live time more as an extended present which endures as long as the individual life, while for us, the single life contains an infinity of present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in volition and in action… The moment of actuality slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which perpetually rages throughout creation.
Paradoxically, the key to actuality is not maximizing but minimizing the possibilities of the moment:
The instant admits only one action while the rest of possibility lies unrealized. Actuality is the eye of the storm: it is a diamond with an infinitesimal perforation through which the ingots and billets of present possibility are drawn into past events. The emptiness of actuality can be estimated by the possibilities that fail to attain realization in any instant: only when they are few can actuality seem full.
The cruelty and the kindness of time is that the moment, while leaden with the baggage of the past and the burden of the future, is the only place where our lives take shape, where the shape can be reimagined and remade. And despite all of our advances in the science of now, it may be that art remains our best means of making the moment a laboratory of the possible. Kubler observes:
Most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas and upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures. These processes of change are all mysterious uncharted regions where the traveler soon loses direction and stumbles in darkness. The clues to guide us are very few indeed: perhaps the jottings and sketches of architects and artists, put down in the heat of imagining a form, or the manuscript brouillons of poets and musicians, crisscrossed with erasures and corrections, are the hazy coast lines of this dark continent of the “now,” where the impress of the future is received by the past.
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”
Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and spiritual rewards, its primal sanities.
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) was in his late thirties when he began answering the eager letters of the nineteen-year-old Franz Xaver Kappus — an aspiring poet and cadet at the same military academy that had nearly broken Rilke’s own adolescent soul. Shortly after Rilke’s death of leukemia, Kappus published the correspondence. Letters to a Young Poet came to stand as one of the finest books of the past century. In a wonderful new translation by ecological philosopher, Buddhist scholar, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, and poet and clinical psychologist Anita Barrows, Rilke writes:
What (you might ask yourself) would a solitude be that didn’t have some greatness to it? For there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear. It comes almost all the time when you’d gladly exchange it for any togetherness, however banal and cheap; exchange it for the appearance of however strong a conformity with the ordinary, with the least worthy. But perhaps that is precisely the time when solitude ripens; its ripening can be painful as the growth of a boy and sad like the beginning of spring… What is needed is only this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going within and meeting no one else for hours — that is what one must learn to attain. To be solitary as one was as a child. As the grown-ups were moving about, preoccupied with things that seemed big and important because the grown-ups appeared so busy and because you couldn’t understand what they were doing.
A lifetime after she composed her stunning ode to solitude as a young poet, after she contemplated solitude as the seedbed of self-discovery upon entering her sixties, May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) moved to Maine to spend the last chapter of her life living alone in a house with a garden on the edge of the sea. Friends came to visit, as did strangers who admired her poetry and had found her address in the phone book — those were the days — but she cherished her solitude above even the most welcome company.
I try to see them one at a time. I mean every encounter here to be more than superficial, to be a real exchange of lives, and this is more easily accomplished one to one than in a group. But the continuity is solitude. Without long periods here alone, especially in winter when visits are rare, I would have nothing to give, and would be less open to the gifts offered me. Solitude has replaced the single intense relationship, the passionate love that even at Nelson [Sarton’s prior home] focused all the rest. Solitude, like a long love, deepens with time, and, I trust, will not fail me if my own powers of creation diminish. For growing into solitude is one way of growing to the end.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his account of the months he spent at Walden Pond, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Although Thoreau’s solitude was not in actuality as total as he recounted it, it was deep and transformative. In a long meditation on solitude and the meaning of life, he writes in Walden (public library | public domain):
It is as solitary where I live as on the prairies. It is as much Asia or Africa as New England. I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself.
[…]
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go [out among others] than when we stay in our chambers.
For Thoreau, who suffered bouts of debilitating depression and black grief, solitude was not a way of caving in on himself, as one does in loneliness, but a way of unselfing, of stepping beyond his small human turmoils and into the wider universe that holds:
The most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encouraging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misanthrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
In the last years of the nineteenth century, shortly after he originated an entire new field we now call neuroscience and a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for establishing the neuron as the basic unit of the nervous system, Santiago Ramón y Cajal (May 1, 1852–October 17, 1934) composed a short, passionate book titled Advice for a Young Investigator (public library), predating Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet by three decades. In it, he outlined the six psychological flaws that keep the talented from reaching greatness and pointed to solitude as the supreme incubator of true originality. He writes:
Our major commitment … is to discover ourselves before discovering scientific truth, to mold ourselves before molding nature. To fashion a strong brain, an original mind that is ours alone — this is the preliminary work that is absolutely essential.
[…]
Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought! How satisfying and rewarding are the long winter evenings spent in the private laboratory, at the very time when educational centers are closed to their workers! Such evenings free us from poorly thought out improvisations, strengthen our patience, and refine our powers of observation.
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness…
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls, strowing the floors like trodden herbs. A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.
[…]
The easy chair spreads wide arms of welcome; the sofa stretches, guest-free; the books gleam, brown and golden, buff and blue and maroon, from their shelves; they may strew the floor, the chairs, the couch, once more, lying ready to the hand… The echo of the foolish words lingers on the air, is brushed away, dies forgotten, the air closes behind it. A heavy volume is heaved from its shelf on to the sofa. Silence drops like falling blossoms over the recovered kingdom… It is a gift, a miracle, a golden jewel, a fragment of some gracious heavenly order, dropped to earth like some incredible strayed star. One’s life to oneself again.
By withdrawing from the world into solitude, you separate yourself from others. By isolating yourself, you can see more clearly what distinguishes you from other people. Standing out in this way serves to affirm your existence (ex-[out] + sistere [stand]). Liberated from social pressures and constraints, solitude can help you understand better what kind of person you are and what your life is for. In this way you become independent of others. You find your own path, your own voice.
[…]
Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. Sustained aloneness brings you to a tipping point where the pendulum of life returns you to others.
A century after Virginia Woolf made her epochal case for the importance of having a room of one’s own in which to create — that womb of “fertile solitude from which works of art are born — Australian cartoonist, poet, and philosopher Michael Leunig offers a singsong echo of Woolf’s timeless insistence:
Solitude… is what sustains me and protects me from my mind. It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings. There are other lives to consider: avocets, stilts, and stones. Peace is the perspective found in patterns. When I see ring-billed gulls picking on the flesh of decaying carp, I am less afraid of death. We are no more and no less than the life that surrounds us. My fears surface in my isolation. My serenity surfaces in my solitude.
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear. A path fraught with terrors, where snakes and toads lie in wait… Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.
Learning to be nourished by solitude rather than defeated by it, Hesse argues, is a prerequisite for taking charge of our destiny:
Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves… It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity.
[…]
Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.
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