The Music Of Solitude

Aranya and Ishan are neighbours. They are in the autumn of their lives. She is impulsive, anarchic and fiercely feminist. He is gentle, sensitive, orderly and believes in the institution of family, even though he has no one to call his own. Aranya thinks about the many Delhis, from the older one glimmering on the other side of the river to the trans-Yamuna residential complex where she lives now. Ishan is deeply spiritual and draws strength from his Danish guide in the Himalayas. The two of them banter about time, existentialism, changing landscapes, food, music and human nature. They think aloud about aeging and death, and wonder living the way they do amounts to biding time. Krishna Sobti's Samay Sargam is a novel about sharing solitudes and growing old in a city that is at once keenly private and aggressively collective. This is as much a portrait of the changing times as it the story of a beautiful romance that thrives on companionship.

From Captain George Vancouver to Muriel “Curve of Time” Blanchet to Jim “Spilsbury’s Coast” Spilsbury, visitors to Desolation Sound have left behind a trail of books endowing the area with a romantic aura that helps to make it British Columbia’s most popular marine park. In this hilarious and captivating book, CBC personality Grant Lawrence adds a whole new chapter to the saga of this storied piece of BC coastline. Young Grant’s father bought a piece of land next to the park in the 1970s, just in time to encounter the gun-toting cougar lady, left-over hippies, outlaw bikers and an assortment of other characters. In those years Desolation Sound was a place where going to the neighbours’ potluck meant being met with hugs from portly naked hippies and where Russell the Hermit’s school of life (boating, fishing, and rock ’n’ roll) was Grant’s personal Enlightenment—an influence that would take him away from the coast to a life of music and journalism and eventually back again. With rock band buddies and a few cases of beer in tow, an older, cooler Grant returns to regale us with tales of “going bush,” the tempting dilemma of finding an unguarded grow-op, and his awkward struggle to convince a couple of visiting kayakers that he’s a legit CBC radio host while sporting a wild beard and body wounds and gesticulating with a machete. With plenty of laugh-out-loud humour and inspired reverence, Adventures in Solitude delights us with the unique history of a place and the growth of a young man amidst the magic of Desolation Sound.

"[An] illuminating memoir." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times The story of a composer's life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change In the summer of 1975, the composer John Luther Adams, then a twenty-two-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska. So began a journey into the mountains, forests, and tundra of the far north—and across distinctive mental and aural terrain—that would last for the next forty years. Silences So Deep is Adams’s account of these formative decades—and of what it’s like to live alone in the frozen woods, composing music by day and spending one’s evenings with a raucous crew of poets, philosophers, and fishermen. From adolescent loves—Edgard Varèse and Frank Zappa—to mature preoccupations with the natural world that inform such works as The Wind in High Places, Adams details the influences that have allowed him to emerge as one of the most celebrated and recognizable composers of our time. Silences So Deep is also a memoir of solitude enriched by friendships with the likes of the conductor Gordon Wright and the poet John Haines, both of whom had a singular impact on Adams’s life. Whether describing the travails of environmental activism in the midst of an oil boom or midwinter conversations in a communal sauna, Adams writes with a voice both playful and meditative, one that evokes the particular beauty of the Alaskan landscape and the people who call it home. Ultimately, this book is also the story of Adams’s difficult decision to leave a rapidly warming Alaska and to strike out for new topographies and sources of inspiration. In its attentiveness to the challenges of life in the wilderness, to the demands of making art in an age of climate crisis, and to the pleasures of intellectual fellowship, Silences So Deep is a singularly rich account of a creative life.

This book presents a thematic analysis of various aspects of solitude, silence and loneliness, from the ancient world to the present day, explored thematically with consideration to the links between aloneness to other social and political issues. The themes include exile (expulsion from a community), ecstasy (getting 'out of oneself') and enstasy (being comfortable within oneself), to the Romantic idea of the artist as solitary. There is work on aloneness in and through nature, especially the importance of natural settings for positive experiences of solitude. A central theme is alienation and its emotions, with the idea of loneliness and the rejected self being a more modern experience. The book explores modernism and postmodernism as presenting new forms of solitude in the twentieth century, and how, more recently, there have been attempts to 'recover' the self, through therapeutic uses of the arts. All of these types and experiences of aloneness are described through the lenses of artistic, literary and musical forms of expression, as aloneness is not only explored and articulated through these art forms, but is in many ways created through these art forms.

This book presents a thematic analysis of various aspects of solitude, silence and loneliness, from the ancient world to the present day, explored thematically with consideration to the links between aloneness to other social and political issues. The themes include exile (expulsion from a community), ecstasy (getting 'out of oneself') and enstasy (being comfortable within oneself), to the Romantic idea of the artist as solitary. There is work on aloneness in and through nature, especially the importance of natural settings for positive experiences of solitude. A central theme is alienation and its emotions, with the idea of loneliness and the rejected self being a more modern experience. The book explores modernism and postmodernism as presenting new forms of solitude in the twentieth century, and how, more recently, there have been attempts to 'recover' the self, through therapeutic uses of the arts. All of these types and experiences of aloneness are described through the lenses of artistic, literary and musical forms of expression, as aloneness is not only explored and articulated through these art forms, but is in many ways created through these art forms.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Solitude, Silence and Loneliness is the first major account integrating research on solitude, silence and loneliness from across academic disciplines and across the lifespan. The editors explore how being alone – in its different forms, positive and negative, as solitude, silence and loneliness – is learned and developed, and how it is experienced in childhood and youth, adulthood and old age. Philosophical, psychological, historical, cultural and religious issues are addressed by distinguished scholars from Europe, North and Latin America, and Asia.

Solitude is not foreign to anyone. It is a universal reality that permeates all our experiences. But why write a book about it? One answer: God. God is the One we seek in solitude. Solitude, which is a listening to God, a being with God, an attentiveness to God’s word and wisdom, and a being-in-love with God, is worth the journey into it. Persons who enter into solitude and taste its fruits will no longer see as they saw before. Solitude offers another way of seeing. When we are open to discover and to receive, the mystery of solitude purifies the sight, the seeing, the beholding of each person. When solitude brings us to God, God brings us into new vision. This book is directed to all who seek God and who long to “see” God and to know God’s ways more truly. This book is for those who are so eager to be transformed in Christ that they are willing to wade into the waters of solitude. This book invites you to an exploration that begins with the desires to pray: to pray because the hunger for God pursues you; to pray because you believe the value of prayer. Solitude is a milieu of prayer: it beckons us to seek God. Prayer will lead you into the solitude God wants for you. Prayer opens the door to a solitude which will open you to God. Once you read this book, solitude will not be a solitude of emptiness; love will be near.