Solitude: A Return to the Self

xv, 216 pp. "In the supreme importance that we place on intimate relationships, have we overlooked the deep, sustaining power of solitude in human life? Anthony Storr feels that we have, and his Solitude: A Return to the Self is a provocative, highly articulate mediation on solitude, creativity, and the sources of man's inner happiness and psychic wholeness. In exploring the connection between solitude and the creative personality, Storr offers fascinating and original portraits of such geniuses as Beethoven, Henry James, Goya, Wittgenstein, Kipling, and Beatrix Potter, all of whom were alone - either by choice, by circumstance, or by enforcement - at crucial periods in their lives. But it is not only the great who benefit from solitude. Storr examines the uses that ordinary people make of solitude in times of bereavement and depression, in escaping from the pressures of daily life, in communing with a higher power through prayer, and in finding and expressing their deepest selves. Beautifully and insightfully written, illuminated with superb quotations drawn from world literature, and carefully documented with references to the works of the most important psychologists, Solitude is a book that speaks to a profound and heretofore profoundly neglected human need: the need to be alone."