On Solitude and Self-Possession: What We Learn When We Travel Alone
I am forty-one, sitting in a panificio in Torino with focaccia and cappuccino, and I realise I have never eaten breakfast alone in a foreign city before.
In 1934, when Freya Stark was forty-one, she published The Valleys of the Assassins, an account of her solo travels through Persia. In the preface, she wrote something that has stayed with me.
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
But Stark was already a seasoned solo traveler by then. Her first journey alone had come much earlier, in her twenties, driven partly by necessity (she was recovering from illness) and partly by what she called "the wish to be free."
The question of when women begin to travel alone, and why, interested the psychologist Harriet Goldhor Lerner, who wrote extensively about female autonomy in midlife. In The Dance of Intimacy, she observed that women often experience a particular developmental moment around forty when they begin to distinguish between aloneness chosen and loneliness imposed. She cited studies showing that women who traveled solo in midlife reported not adventure or escape as their primary motivation, but rather what one participant called "meeting myself on my own terms."
This maps onto what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called "self-possession." Not in the sense of self-control, but in the literal sense of possessing oneself, of being in one's own custody. In The Human Condition, Arendt argued that solitude was distinct from isolation or loneliness because it involved being "together with myself." She was building on Marcus Aurelius, who wrote in his Meditations.
“ Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains... But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.”
But Aurelius was an emperor, and Arendt was writing philosophy. The lived experience of women learning to be alone appears in different sources.
May Sarton was fifty-eight when she moved alone to Nelson, New Hampshire, and began keeping the journal that became Journal of a Solitude. On October 11, 1970, she wrote: "Begin here. It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my 'real' life again at last."
Sarton was not traveling, but she was doing something related: establishing herself as the primary relationship in her own life. In a later entry, she noted: "I am not lonely except occasionally, and then more with a sense of missing out on something than from lack of company."
A breakfast alone in a foreign city is perhaps such a ceremony.
The writer M.F.K. Fisher, who spent much of her life traveling and eating alone, addressed this directly in An Alphabet for Gourmets. In her essay "A Is for Dining Alone," she wrote: "When I was a child, my Aunt Gwen... told me that I must never, never, never eat anything in a restaurant that I could possibly recognise... She was betraying, unconsciously, one of the cardinal rules of Solitary Dining: not only must it be strange, but it must be eaten with a certain amount of ceremonious attention."
Fisher was describing how eating alone requires learning a new relationship to food and to time itself. Without conversation, you notice flavour differently. Without accommodation to another person's pace, you discover your own.
The poet May Swenson, in her late thirties, took her first solo trip to Europe. In a letter to her friend Elizabeth Bishop, she described sitting in a café in Rome: "I keep thinking I should be lonely, but instead I feel extremely alert, as if all my senses have new capacity. I am eating an orange and it is the orangest orange."
This heightened perception appears repeatedly in accounts of solo travel. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his research on optimal experience, found that people reported increased sensory awareness when alone in unfamiliar environments. He theorised this was because consciousness, freed from social monitoring, could attend fully to immediate experience.
Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, famously argued for the necessity of literal space and economic independence for women writers. But she also argued for something less tangible: the necessity of solitude as a precondition for thought itself. "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction," she wrote. But earlier in the essay, she describes walking alone and thinking: "Certainly it was freedom, and it was enjoyable."
The focaccia is gone. The cappuccino has left a fine line of foam on the inside of the cup. I have been here perhaps twenty minutes, but I have traveled much farther than the distance from my hotel. I have arrived at something Freya Stark knew at forty-one, that May Sarton learned at fifty-eight, that Woolf was circling all her life: that being alone is a skill, that solitude is not the absence of others but the presence of oneself.
Outside, Torino continues its morning. I will walk its porticoes. I will get lost and find myself. I will eat other meals, alone and not alone. If this resonated, subscribe below.
ITALY
OCTOBER 2024