The Value of Solitude

Abstract

Confinement can present itself in terms of loss and deprivation, but it can also enable us to rediscover the moral value of solitude as a necessary condition for the birth of revolutionary ideas that can change the world. World literature plays an important part in this process, with its self-reflective power that allows for a “detached engagement” with the world at large, as David Damrosch has posited in What Is World Literature? This conception of solitude as a paradoxical condition for the birth of revolutionary ideas that can change the world goes back as far as the 12th Dynasty Egyptian text The Debate Between a Man and His Soul, long before there ever was a “Western tradition” that goes from Stoicism to Montaigne, Virginia Woolf and beyond. This essay will tell the secret story of one of the circulation routes of the value of solitude as key to participation and revolutionary intervention in a world in crisis.