THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 21 - 22, 2020 |C11
Step out
in the
yard to
see the
spring—
or stay
indoors
and
read all
about it.CHILDREN’S
BOOKS
MEGHAN
COXGURDONBYGEOFFWISNER
I
N THE UNITED STATES,the home of
rugged individualism, more than 28%
of households consist of a single
person. Yet solitude continues to have
a poor reputation.
Two thoughtful new books set out to change
that. “The Art of Solitude,” by Stephen Batchelor,
a scholar of Buddhism, takes an inward view
of the subject, chronicling the author’s lifetime
of meditation practice, solitary retreats and
experiments with mind-altering substances.
“At the Center of All Beauty,” by the Catholic
author and scholar Fenton Johnson, takes a
more expansive approach, offering capsule
biographies of a dozen or so writers, artists
and performers who drew on solitude in dif-
ferent ways to power their creative expression.
Elegant and formally ingenious, “The Art of
Solitude” presents 32 essays on aspects of solitude.
Some describe Mr. Batchelor’s experience of
meditation in places as far-flung as India, South
Korea and Mexico. A few are about his engage-
ment with Michel de Montaigne, the 16th-
century pioneer of the personal essay and
sometime recluse. Some recount the insights
drawn from his use of body-racking, vision-
inducing drugs such as mescaline and ayahuasca.
The essays echo and comment on one
another, and they also echo the book’s appendix,
Mr. Batchelor’s translation from the Pali
language of a sequence of poems that he calls
“Four Eights.” Mr. Batchelor cites an earlier
translator’s opinion that these four poems, each
32 lines long, make up the core of the 2,400-
year-old Buddhist text “Sutta Nipāta” and “might
be the earliest record of the Buddha’s teaching.”
The book as a whole resists falling into a
narrative or argument. “None of its thirty-two
chapters,” writes Mr. Batchelor, “is ever preceded
or followed by a chapter that treats the same
theme.” To build a case for the value of solitude
would, the author seems to feel, be declassé.
Finishing “The Art of Solitude,” it’s easy to
feel that one must have a Ph.D. in ancient
languages, a strong stomach and the money and
leisure to seek out stone towers in distant lands
if one wants to be properly solitary. And even
then, the results may not be worth the effort.
“Over the years,” writes Mr. Batchelor,
“I must have spent many thousands of hours
seated on a meditation cushion, but I still get
distracted, listless, and bored....Therecanbe
long periods when I do not meditate formally
at all. Often I feel like a dilettante.”
If this is discouraging, it might help to turn
to “At the Center of All Beauty,” a more flexible
and forgiving approach to the subject of soli-
tude. Rather than suggesting that the benefits
of solitude come only with suffering and deep
study, this book serves up encouragement to
the would-be solitary and offers examples of
the many ways solitude can structure our lives.
As a seventh-grade student in a Catholic
school in Kentucky, Fenton Johnson was asked
to draw a picture of something from the
catechism. The result was “Three Roads to
Heaven,” in which three paths diverge toward
the Religious Life, Marriage, and “a cloud
labeled SINGLE, which our catechism offered
as a legitimate calling, officially on a par with
the other two options.”
If Catholic teaching suggested that being
alone was OK, a real-life example came from
the nearby Abbey of Gethsemani, where Trap-
pist monks lived and worked in silence, and
Thomas Merton wrote his acclaimed memoir
“The Seven Storey Mountain” and many other
books. Mr. Johnson decided early that he was
“not the marrying kind,” a decision only partly
determined by the fact that he was gay.
Mr. Johnson maintains that solitude is
particularly important to the creators among
us. He makes his case by sketching the lives
of a select company of artistic solitaries, begin-
ning with Henry David Thoreau, the famous
hermit of Walden Pond.
Just kidding. Thoreau was no hermit, as
Mr. Johnson well understands. “The notion of
Thoreau as a hermit,” he writes, “is so far from
the facts that what’s curious is why it devel-
oped in the first place, sinceWaldenis replete
with anecdotes of chatty visits from towns-
people and travelers.” Thoreau surely valued
the time he spent by himself. He wrote, “I love
to be alone. I never found the companion that
was so companionable as solitude.” But it was
not the only time he valued.
“I left the woods for as good a reason as I
went there,” he wrote after his two years, two
months and two days in the little house he
built himself. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I
had several more lives to live and could not
spare any more time for that one.”
Mr. Johnson sheds some light on why
Thoreau has taken so much flak from critics for
failing to be the self-sufficient hermit that he
never said he was. “The reasons for that dis-
crediting, I argue, arise from our need to savage
solitaries who so emphatically and cheerfully
break social norms, because they show how
easily it may be done...Weseemeither to
mock (Thoreau) or idolize (Thomas Merton)tude within their lives and drew out different
kinds of treasure. But Mr. Batchelor, for his part,
also traces the roots of artistic achievement to
solitude. In John Keats’s sonnet “O Solitude!,”
the poet seeks out hills “where the deer’s swift
leap / Startles the wild bee from the foxglove bell.”
Though Keats was no Buddhist, Mr. Batchelor
sees an echo of nirvana in the concept of
“negative capability,” in which one “is capable of
being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without
any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Drugs and sexuality are two areas where these
authors have less in common. There is nothing in
Mr. Johnson’s book to set beside Mr. Batchelor’s
descriptions of taking ayahuasca in Andalusia:
“My mind is invaded by spiraling patterns of
color. I vomit diminishing amounts of a bitter
liquid, my body repeatedly convulsing, sweat
dripping off my face, my nostrils filled with the
vegetal stench of the medicine, until I pass out.”
Similarly, there is nothing in Mr. Batchelor’s
book to set beside Mr. Johnson’s thoughtful
exploration of how discovering that one is “not
the marrying kind”—whether that means being
gay or not—can be the path to the sort of career
that Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson,
Henry James or Eudora Welty enjoyed.
Both these books are essentially pro-solitude,
perhaps in reaction to the anti-solitude prejudices
of Western culture. But both authors would
surely recognize that too much solitude, like too
much of anything, can be just too much. As the
solitary short-story writer E.I. Lonoff remarks
about Nathan Zuckerman in Philip Roth’s “The
Ghost Writer” (perhaps remembering his Keats),
“I was only suggesting—surmising is more like
it—that an unruly personal life will probably
better serve a writer like Nathan than walking
in the woods and startling the deer.”Mr. Wisner is the author of “A Basket of
Leaves” and the editor of “African Lives,”
“Thoreau’s Wildflowers” and “Thoreau’s Animals.”BOOKS
‘I was always my own teacher.’—EUDORA WELTY, ‘ONE WRITER’S BEGINNINGS’
The Art of Solitude
By Stephen Batchelor
Yale, 181 pages, $23
At the Center of All Beauty
By Fenton Johnson
Norton, 236 pages, $26.95
TheyWant to Be Alone
STEVE MCCURRY/MAGNUM PHOTOSthose who seek and enjoy solitude, perhaps
because perceiving them as ordinary folks might
require us to question the cocoon of noise and
artificial light with which we surround ourselves
and that constitutes contemporary life.”
Though Mr. Batchelor is steeped in the Bud-
dhist tradition and Mr. Johnson in the CatholicChurch, there is considerable crossover in their
thinking about solitude. Mr. Batchelor is a
great admirer of Montaigne, who sought to
build a bridge between Catholics and Protes-
tants only to have his volumes of essays placed
on the Index of Prohibited Books for nearly
300 years. Mr. Johnson has less to say about
Buddhism than Mr. Batchelor says about
Catholicism, but he does note that “the Buddha
and Jesus sacrificed their comfortable and
secure lives to cultivate solitude, leaving their
homes and taking to the road.” And yet he
warns that “as the Buddha and Hebrew biblical
prophets point out repeatedly, idols are an
avoidance mechanism, a place where we can
park and abandon our dreams instead of
accepting our responsibility to live them out.”
Both Mr. Batchelor and Mr. Johnson believe in
the value of solitude for the creative life. Indeed,
that is the main subject of Mr. Johnson’s book,
in which we learn how people as different as the
painter Paul Cézanne, the novelist Zora Neale
Hurston, the singer Nina Simone and the street
photographer Bill Cunningham built cells of soli-We seem either to mock or idolize
solitaries, perhaps because
perceiving them as ordinary
might require us to question
the cocoon of noise with which
we surround ourselves.EVEN ASCovid-19 disrupts
regular life, something normal
and lovely is taking place
outdoors: Spring has begun. For
families hunkereddown, picture
books are a great way to bring a
bit of seasonal freshness indoors.
These portraits of notable spring
characters for children ages 3-9
are congenial to look at and
enlightening too.
Henry Cole explains what the
robins are up to in“Nesting”
(Katherine Tegen, 40 pages,
$17.99), a book with black-and-
white drawings made striking by
touches of watercolor in serene
robin’s-egg blue. A male and
female robin meet and set up
house together in an apple tree.
Gathering twigs and bits of
grass, they construct a soft,
swirled nest to hold four eggs
that eventually hatch to release
four clamorous hatchlings.
There’s a grimness in the eye
of the adult robins as they toil
to feed their ravenous offspring
that may ping a chord in human
parents (we’ve all been there).
Then into this busy Eden comes
a snake; literally: it is “hungry,
too, and climbs the apple tree.”
The sight of the invading
predator swaying over the robin
family will come as an outrage
as much to the young reader
as it does to the distraught
birds. “The robins fight back!They dive and swoop!” we read.
“They don’t give up until they
drive the snake away.” All
creatures have to eat, of course,
but thank goodness not this
snake—not in this book.
Did you know that Carolina
wrens sometimes attach snake-
skins to their nests to frighten
off other predators? This is
something children will learn
from“The Nest That Wren
Built” (Candlewick, 32 pages,
$16.99), a beguiling and subtly
informative picture book by
Randi Sonenshine that takes its
cadences from the old song,
“The House That Jack Built.”
Illustrated by Anne Hunter with
ink drawings enhanced by color
pencil in pale shades of pink,
green and brown (see below),
the book has a warm and
tender feeling. Two wrens
construct a place to raise
their young. They collect
twigs, bark, leaves and eventhe egg sacs of spiders. Also:
“This is the snakeskin warding
off harm,/ascalyandthin rep-
tilian charm, / draped on the
nest that Wren built.” As with
Mr. Cole’s robins, we follow the
wren family from nest-building
to nest-leaving. In a sweet coda,
a mouse takes up residence in
the abandoned dwelling, and we
are glad of it.
From birds to bees: Candace
Fleming details the fantastic
industriousness ofApis mellifera
in“Honeybee” (Holiday House,
40 pages, $18.99), a picture
book illustrated by Eric
Rohmann with such intensity
and accuracy that the squeamish
reader may want to look on
from a distance while someone
else reads aloud. Not that there’s
anything intrinsically yucky
about these creatures, with
their antennae and furred
bodies, and heaven knows they
do wonderful work with pollen
and wax, but up close they do
look alarming.
Ms. Fleming uses an engaging
technique to take readers
through the life cycle of a single
worker bee. After describing
each stage of development, she
raises the question of whether
ourApisis ready to fly. The
short answer is “not yet,”
as the honeybee clambers
from the wax chamberwhere she turned from larva into
bee, then tends to her queen.
“WhenApisturns twelve days
old, glands in her abdomen begin
making flakes of white wax. It is
time for her new job. Flying?”Nope: comb-building. When the
time comes to fly, both the pages
and the perspective open out:
It’s a relief to the eye (and maybe
to the bee, too) to be loosed on a
meadow glorious with nodding
wildflowers.
April Pulley Sayre uses
photographs to bring young
readers close to another of
springtime’s distinctive
creatures in“Being Frog”(Beach Lane, 32 pages, $17.99),
a book as spare as it is droll.
Frogs may have interior lives
full of depth and angst for all
we know, but on the outside
they do have a humorous aspect.
Ms. Sayre’s camera captures this
quality: the green skin, the
yellow eyes, the wide mouth set
in what looks like frowning
resolution. “A frog has
favorites,” we read. “This rock.
This log. Its daily job? Support
the frog.” Children will see the
frog’s development from egg to
tadpole to froglet, but really this
is an appreciation rather than a
primer, and a charming one, too.
Carme Lemniscates draws
parallels between the human
and plant world in“Seeds”
(Candlewick Studio, 32 pages,
$14.99), a picture book about the
great things that can grow from
tiny origins. “Seeds carry the
power of life,” we read. “So they
embark on amazing adventures.”
In the colorful mixed-media
illustrations, seeds float through
the air, germinate in the ground
and develop into rosy orchids
and tidy rows of vegetables. But
there are other kinds of seeds,
Ms. Lemniscates notes: seeds
that produce kindness, or anger.
Fortunately, in life as in the
garden, we all “get to decide
which ones to plant and which
ones to help grow.”Feather Your Nest With Picture Books
THIS WEEK
Nesting
By Henry ColeThe Nest That Wren Built
By Randi Sonenshine
Illustrated by Anne HunterHoneybee
By Candace Fleming
Illustrated by Eric RohmannBeing Frog
By April Pulley SayreSeeds
By Carme LemniscatesCANDLEWICK