Mark: Here’s a thought: our modern obsession with constant connection, with being 'social,' isn't a timeless human virtue. It's a surprisingly recent cultural anxiety. And the very thing we're taught to fear most—being alone—might be the one skill we desperately need to relearn. Michelle: That feels so counterintuitive. We're told community is everything, that connection is the key to happiness. You're saying that's... a new idea? Mark: In many ways, yes. And that's the radical idea at the heart of a fascinating little book we're diving into today: How to Be Alone by Sara Maitland. Michelle: Oh, I've heard about this one. And Maitland is the perfect person to write this, isn't she? She's a novelist with a background in theology who, after her marriage ended, found herself living alone on a remote Scottish moor. She apparently went from being miserable to discovering this profound happiness in solitude. Mark: Exactly. She lives it. This isn't just theory for her. And the book isn't a simple self-help guide; it's a deep, historical investigation into why we're so scared of our own company. It actually got a pretty mixed reception—some readers found it incredibly liberating, while others felt it was a bit defensive, which is something we can definitely get into. Michelle: I'm intrigued. Because the fear is real. I mean, the term "nomophobia"—the fear of being without your phone—is a recognized condition now. We're terrified of being disconnected for even a few minutes. Mark: And Maitland argues that fear has a history. Her argument starts in a place you'd never expect: ancient Rome.

Michelle: Ancient Rome? What do gladiators and togas have to do with me feeling weird about eating dinner alone at a restaurant? Mark: Everything, it turns out. Maitland paints this incredible picture of a clash of two ancient worlds. In the Roman Empire, your value was entirely public. Cicero, the great Roman statesman, said it all: the noblest men have an "insatiable desire for honour, command, power and glory." Your worth was your social standing, your service to the state. Private life, your inner world? That was secondary. Being alone was seen as useless. Michelle: Hold on, the Roman obsession with public standing... that sounds exactly like Instagram culture! Your worth is based on what other people see and validate. The likes, the comments, the public performance of a successful life. Mark: It's the same psychological engine. And then, a new, radical idea emerges: Christianity. It flipped the Roman model on its head. Suddenly, what mattered wasn't your public glory, but your private, personal relationship with God. The most important work was done internally, in solitude. Think of the desert hermits, the mystics. They believed that in silence, you could find your true self, your soul. Michelle: So you have this massive cultural collision: Team Public Glory versus Team Inner Soul. Mark: A total collision. And for centuries, these two value systems were in a tense balance. But then, Maitland points to the 18th century—the Enlightenment. It was a movement that tried to revive those classical Roman ideals. It became all about reason, civility, and social grace. Being a good person meant being good in society. Michelle: And being alone became weird again. Mark: Worse than weird. It was seen as "sad, mad, or bad." The Enlightenment writer Edward Gibbon looked back at the Christian hermits with disgust, calling them "hideous, distorted and emaciated maniacs." Solitude was repellent, almost immoral. And that attitude, that deep suspicion of the person who chooses to be alone, has trickled all the way down to us. Michelle: Wow. So when I feel a pang of anxiety because I'm not on a group chat or at a party, I'm not just being neurotic. I'm channeling an 18th-century philosopher's anxieties about social order. Mark: You're inheriting a cultural bias. And then the Romantics, poets like Wordsworth, pushed back. They celebrated solitude, nature, and the individual's emotional landscape. Wordsworth wrote, "How gracious, how benign, is Solitude." So we're left with this profound confusion—a cultural tug-of-war between the social ideal and the solitary ideal. Michelle: Which explains why we feel so conflicted. We're told to "be yourself" and "find yourself," but also to "build your network" and "stay connected." It's a total contradiction. Mark: And we default to the easier, more visible path: the social one. We pathologize the other. We see someone alone and we project loneliness, sadness, or failure onto them. Michelle: Okay, so if this fear is so deeply baked into our culture, how on earth do we unlearn it? It feels impossible. It’s like trying to unlearn gravity. Mark: Well, this is where Maitland's book shifts from history to a practical toolkit. She argues that solitude is a skill, not a personality trait. And she offers some incredible, practical ways to train it. One of the most powerful ideas is the concept of "learning by heart."

Michelle: Learning by heart? You mean like memorizing things? Honestly, Mark, the last thing I memorized was my Wi-Fi password. Does that count? Mark: (Laughs) It's a start! But Maitland means something deeper. She argues that in an age of infinite external information—Google, Wikipedia, everything on our phones—we've let our internal worlds become empty. A "well-stocked mind," as she calls it, is a profound source of companionship. It’s about having a mental larder full of poems, stories, songs, or even complex knowledge that you can turn to when you're alone. Michelle: A mental larder. I like that. It’s like you’re never truly empty-handed. Mark: Exactly. And she tells one of the most astonishing stories I've ever read to prove this point. It's about a woman named Edith Bone. Michelle: Okay, tell me. Mark: Edith Bone was a journalist arrested in Hungary in 1949 and thrown into solitary confinement. For seven years. No books, no windows, no human contact. Just a dark, wet cell. It was designed to break her mind. Michelle: Seven years. I can't even imagine seven hours. How did she survive? Mark: With her mental larder. She was a former medical student, so she started by reconstructing the entire human skeleton, bone by bone, in her mind. Then she moved on to geography, mentally walking the streets of every city she'd ever visited, naming every street and landmark. She recited all the poetry she knew, then started translating it into the other six languages she spoke. She even invented a way to make an abacus out of stale bread and used it to work out complex mathematical problems. Michelle: Whoa. That is a superpower. She literally built a world inside her head to live in. Her mind became her companion. Mark: It saved her. When she was finally released after seven years, her captors were stunned. She was completely sane, sharp, and unbroken. Her point is that what we have internalized, what we've learned by heart, becomes part of our core self. It's a link to the larger world that no one can take away. Michelle: That's incredible. But okay, most of us aren't facing solitary confinement. What does this look like for a regular person living in 2024? Does it mean I have to go memorize Shakespeare? Mark: It can be much simpler. Maitland suggests starting small. Learn the lyrics to a favorite album. Memorize a recipe so you can cook it from feel. Or learn a single short poem. The act of memorizing itself is a discipline that strengthens your mind and gives you an internal resource. It’s a way of proving to yourself that you have enough inside you to be good company. Michelle: I see. It’s not about the content, it’s about the practice of stocking the larder. She also talks about training children, right? That seems so counter-cultural today, when we schedule every minute of a child's life. Mark: It is. She criticizes our tendency to overprotect kids from any moment of alarm or boredom. She argues we should be giving them safe experiences of solitude. Let them play alone in the garden. Read them classic fairy tales—stories where the hero, like Hansel or Gretel, is alone, faces danger, and overcomes it through their own cunning and courage. We're teaching them resilience and the capacity to rely on themselves. Michelle: We're so focused on teaching social skills, we forget to teach solitary skills. And this training, this isn't just about survival or coping with being alone. You said there's a bigger prize, right? Mark: That's the final, and most beautiful, part of the book. Maitland's ultimate point is that solitude, when embraced, leads to profound joy. She outlines five key rewards that are waiting for us.

Michelle: Okay, I'm ready for the payoff. What are these five great joys? Mark: She lists them as: a deeper consciousness of yourself, a deeper attunement to nature, a deeper relationship with the transcendent or spiritual, an increased sense of freedom, and finally, increased creativity. Michelle: Let's talk about creativity. That one feels huge, especially in our modern work culture. Mark: It's a big one. Maitland quotes Edward Gibbon again, who said, "Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school for genius." Great art and original thinking require some degree of solitude. And she gives this perfect example: the physicist Werner Heisenberg. Michelle: The Uncertainty Principle guy? Mark: The very one. In the 1920s, he was completely stuck on a major theoretical problem about how to model the atom. He'd been debating it with colleagues for years, getting nowhere. He was totally blocked. Then, he came down with a severe case of hay fever. Michelle: (Laughs) The great motivator of scientific breakthroughs: allergies. Mark: Precisely! To escape the pollen, he took a boat to a tiny, barren, treeless island in the North Sea called Heligoland. He was completely alone. And in that absolute solitude, away from all the noise and debate, his mind cleared. Within days, he had the breakthrough. He developed the core mathematics for his Theory of Imprecision, which we now know as the Uncertainty Principle. It was a foundation of quantum mechanics, and it happened because he was forced into solitude. Michelle: That is the complete opposite of how we're told to work now. We're all about open-plan offices, mandatory brainstorming sessions, constant collaboration on Slack. It makes you wonder, are we killing creativity by eliminating solitude? Mark: Maitland would argue we are. We've confused collaboration with creativity. They can work together, but creativity needs its own space to breathe. The writer Franz Kafka put it perfectly. He said writing requires "that utmost of self-revelation and surrender… that is why one can never be alone enough when one writes… why even night is not night enough." You need to get away from the social world to hear your own thoughts clearly. Michelle: And that ties into her idea of freedom, too, I imagine. Being free from the expectations and opinions of others. Mark: Exactly. She quotes the philosopher Alice Koller, who defines being solitary as "being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your own presence rather than of the absence of others." It’s not about what you're missing, but about what you have, right there with you.

Michelle: So what I'm really taking away from this is that solitude isn't an absence of people. It's the presence of yourself. Mark: Exactly. And it's a presence we've been culturally conditioned to fear, a fear that Maitland traces back through centuries of history. Her work is a powerful reminder that freedom isn't just about what you can do in the world; it's about the richness of the world you can build inside your own mind. Michelle: It reframes the whole conversation. It’s not about being anti-social. It’s about finding a balance. You need both. You need the connection with others, but you also need the connection with yourself. And we've let that second part atrophy. Mark: Completely. And the ability to be alone well, to find joy and strength in your own company, might be the most crucial, and most neglected, form of personal freedom we have in this noisy, hyper-connected age. It’s the foundation for authentic creativity, genuine self-awareness, and even better relationships, because they become relationships of choice, not of need. Michelle: I love that. And for anyone listening who feels that fear, but is also a little bit inspired, Maitland suggests starting small. You don't have to move to a remote moor. Mark: Not at all. She says just go for a walk and deliberately leave your phone at home. Go to a movie by yourself. Or try her challenge: learn one short poem by heart this week. See how it feels to have it there, in your mental larder. Michelle: It's an adventure in its own right. A quiet one. Mark: The quietest, and maybe the most rewarding. Michelle: This has been fascinating. It really challenges a core assumption about how we're supposed to live. Mark: This is Aibrary, signing off.