Migrations to Solitude

By Sue Halpern

Book Overview

Profoundly original essays from the author of Summer Hours at the Robbers Library about the nature of solitude and privacy in a culture where ourlaws, technology, and lifestyles are increasingly chipping away at them both. Why do we often long for solitude but dread loneliness? What happens when the walls we build around ourselves are suddenly removed-or made impenetrable? If privacy is something we can count as a basic right, why are chipping it away? These are some of the themes that Sue Halpern eloquently explores in these essays. In pursuit of the riddle of solitude, Halpern talks to Trappist monks and secular hermits, corresponds with a prisoner in solitary confinement, and visits and AIDS hospice and a shelter for the homeless places where privacy is thefirst-and perhaps the most essential-thing to go. This is a book that lends weight to the ideas that have become dangerously abstract in a society of data bases and car faxes, a guide not only to the routes of solitude but to the selves we discover only when we arrive there.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679742417
• ISBN13: 9780679742418
• Release Date: February 1993
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Essays on Solitude

This book is comprised of thoughtful essays all dealing with the theme of solitude. Solitude is examined from varies perspectives and environments - a hospital inten- sive care unit, a homeless shelter, high-tech spy operations and a Buddhist Monas- tery. I highly recommend this book.

Beautifully written and enduring book

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Migrations to Solitude and I recommend the book for its subject matter, which is the quest for privacy in a crowded world. The book is divided into 12 "profoundly original" essays that have a common thread of a spiritual journey. I felt very much connected to the author while reading the book and I didn't want the book to end. The book was published in 1992 prior to the current invasion of privacy by the present administration. I wonder what Helperin would have written if she knew the invasiveness of Big Brother in our lives today. A quest for Solitude today might be impossible now in our society and all of the places of solitudes are perhaps gone for ever like the Dodo bird.