The Spirit of Place, and Other Essays

								

landscapes, verge beyond verge, a thousand thousand places in the woods,
and on uplifted hills.  Or rather, solitudes are not to be measured by
miles; they are to be numbered by days.  They are freshly and freely the
dominion of every man for the day of his possession.  There is loneliness
for innumerable solitaries.  As many days as there are in all the ages,
so many solitudes are there for men.  This is the open house of the
earth; no one is refused.  Nor is the space shortened or the silence
marred because, one by one, men in multitudes have been alone there
before.  Solitude is separate experience.  Nay, solitudes are not to be
numbered by days, but by men themselves.  Every man of the living and
every man of the dead might have had his "privacy of light."
It needs no park.  It is to be found in the merest working country; and a
thicket may be as secret as a forest.  It is not so difficult to get for
a time out of sight and earshot.  Even if your solitude be enclosed, it
is still an open solitude, so there be "no cloister for the eyes," and a
space of far country or a cloud in the sky be privy to your hiding-place.
But the best solitude does not hide at all.
This the people who have drifted together into the streets live whole
lives and never know.  Do they suffer from their deprivation of even the
solitude of the hiding-place?  There are many who never have a whole hour
alone.  They live in reluctant or indifferent companionship, as people
may in a boarding-house, by paradoxical choice, familiar with one another
and not intimate.  They live under careless observation and subject to a
vagabond curiosity.  Theirs is the involuntary and perhaps the
unconscious loss which is futile and barren.
One knows the men, and the many women, who have sacrificed all their
solitude to the perpetual society of the school, the cloister, or the
hospital ward.  They walk without secrecy, candid, simple, visible,
without moods, unchangeable, in a constant communication and practice of
action and speech.  Theirs assuredly is no barren or futile loss, and
they have a conviction, and they bestow the conviction, of solitude
deferred.
Who has painted solitude so that the solitary seemed to stand alone and
inaccessible?  There is the loneliness of the shepherdess in many a
drawing of J.F. Millet.  The little figure is away, aloof.  The girl
stands so when the painter is gone.  She waits so on the sun for the
closing of the hours of pasture.  Millet has her as she looks, out of
sight.
Now, although solitude is a prepared, secured, defended, elaborate
possession of the rich, they too deny themselves the natural solitude of
a woman with a child.  A newly-born child is so nursed and talked about,
handled and jolted and carried about by aliens, and there is so much
importunate service going forward, that a woman is hardly alone long
enough to become aware, in recollection, how her own blood moves