Howard Axelrod doesn’t own a cell phone. The author of The Stars in Our Pockets: Getting Lost and Sometimes Found in the Digital Age and director of Loyola University’s creative writing program does use email, but only after noon. “It's helpful to begin the day in the spirit in which I want it to continue,” he told me. Which is to say: undisturbed.
At times, he takes the same approach to travel: Some parts of the world are better explored alone, and what we find there is better left kept to ourselves—felt, not discussed. “So much of experience is not translatable and benefits from not being translated,” said Axelrod on the phone—a landline—from his home just north of Chicago.
He did try to translate the experience of the two years he spent alone in Vermont, though, for his 2015 memoir, The Point of Vanishing. So, I wondered, could he translate it for us? What is the power of solitude, and why should we make room for traveling alone? Below is an edited version of our conversation.
How do you define solitude?
Solitude is when you take time deliberately for yourself. Just as we have a need to be social on a primal level, we also have the need for quiet, for time alone with ourselves. It’s deeply restorative.
How did people respond when you returned from your time in Vermont?
People were either enticed by the idea of so much time alone or it petrified them. For the people who were enticed, they said, "Oh, it must be so nice to be able to hear yourself think." I suppose that's true, but that's not what's really restorative. It's not about hearing yourself think; it's about hearing what's around you when you stop thinking. Once I started to hear the birdsong and the wind and the rain against the windows, I was then able to hear a deeper part of myself that didn't come from thinking.
When no one else is around, that often anxious narrator inside of you quiets down. That person trying to drive the car in your mind—"What about if we do this? Is it this turn or the next one? Where's the next bathroom?"—goes quiet, and then you can tune more into your senses than that voice. That’s when you become aware of a much larger world, and that that larger world has a place for you. You belong in it.
