A couple of weeks ago our car failed to start. Helpfully the screen on the dashboard flashed up an error code. The manual didn’t help but our daughter’s partner Al did. We turned to YouTube, where we found an instructive articulate and very excitable chap with the solution we needed.
Most of us now recognise we have individual learning preferences. Ways we can best improve our skills and knowledge. Talking something through and listening to an enthusiastic and knowledgeable teacher makes my brain sing. I also like to watch the way something is done then go away and have a go, on my own without interference or comment! I think this is a pattern of how we do life – together and apart. There is of course a fine balance between being social and secluded yet both have value.
In conversation with some friends recently one of them quoted Edward Gibbon who wrote ‘Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius.’ I get that, we take knowledge from discussion and shared opinion then alone in the study we knead it in like a baker with her dough. The quote above brought my mind to exploring the context of this word genius. The linking of solitude to genius in the 1870s, when Edward Gibbon wrote his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was understood in its Latin root quite differently from today.
Solitude might be described as being in isolation from others in the community. Take a prisoner for instance, she may remain in prison yet be separated by being placed in solitary confinement. I think at present of so many people who are spending more time than ever before at home, still in the community but placed in isolation, in solitude. To one person, being alone, but not out of choice, is described as being in isolation, yet to another who seeks to be alone their situation is described as being in solitude.
What I find intriguing is the Latin root of this word genius used by Gibbon is that in the mind of some Romans this Latin word, genius described a spirit or guide. It would not be out of place to replace genius in Gibbon’s quote with deity or guardian. It is as though the genius is separate from the person. ‘Solitude is to be in school with God’.
Could it be that Gibbon’s suggestion is that solitude is not aloneness but about being separate from human influence? Like you I learn a great deal from my conversations with friends, my understanding deepens and broadens as the quote suggests. It really helps me when a friend kindly says, ‘I don’t agree with that idea Rob,’ then allows me to come back with an alternative. Yet the real deep stuff, the inspiration, that clear crisp consciousness, comes from times of solitude spent in conscious awareness of my God.
I wonder if the challenge of the day is to turn our enforced isolation into a welcomed solitude. We may prefer to be sitting with others having a coffee and enriching conversation but time with our genius (God) is not wasted!
Rob Wykes 