Solitude, stillness, creativity.

A friend shared a speech that William Deresiewicz gave at Westpoint called “Solitude and Leadership.” One way to sum it up is to say that it's a defense of the value of a cultivated inner life in our times.

Strangely enough, I kept thinking of a passage from Elizabeth Gilbert's The Last American Man while I read the speech. Upon finding what I was remembering, I realized it's about something different. Here, Gilbert describes the sort of people with enough emotional fortitude to work on the mountain farm of a modern survivalist:

“But the people who thrive here—and there aren't many of them—are an interesting species. They are among the most quietly self-aware people I've ever met. They have in common a profound psychic stillness. They don't talk a lot, and they don't seek praise, but they seem confident of themselves. They are able to make themselves vessels of learning without drowning in it. It's as if they decide, when they come here, to take their fragile and sensitive self-identity, fold it up tight, tuck it away someplace safe, and promise to retrieve it two years later, when the apprenticeship will be over.” (215)