A person standing in the water near some mountains.

The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor 2020

While on our month long trip to California, I began to meditate again after a long interruption in my practice.  That renewal was aided by reading Batchelor’s book, a strangely effective reflection on the importance of solitude as a way of finding your soul and your self.

Batchelor, a well known Scottish Buddhist author and retreat leader, has interwoven a number of themes in this slim volume—-his experiences with taking the hallucinogen ayahuasca in shamanistic ceremonies in Mexico and Spain, his visit to Montaigne’s library in Bordeaux, his visits to his teacher’s monastery in Tibet and another monastery in India, his reading of Aldous Huxley, his visit to Delft to experience Vermeer’s origins, and his fascination with the painting of Agnes Martin.  If this sounds somewhat random, that would be exactly how he has ordered these experiences in the book, a method parallel to how he characterizes his art-making form of collage.

This is not a ‘how to’ meditation book but does contain some key insights into how meditation can enable the self-knowledge that one can then take into the ‘fraught encounters’ with others.  Solitude is that “lucid space of freedom where you can respond to the world without being flooded by reactive desires, fears, hatreds, and opinions.”  The paradox of solitude is that it brings you face to face with the rest of humanity and enables one to find a healthy balance between engagement and aloneness.

This is an interesting and valuable book for anyone who has craved the experience of solitude without the sadness of loneliness.