Can solitude be enlightening?

With smartphones making the world available to us at our fingertips, even travel to a foreign land is not anymore being alone in a strange place. 

The real adventure of travel is mental. It is about total immersion in a place, because nobody from any other place can contact you. Thus your life is narrowed to what is immediately before your eyes, making the experience of it that much more vivid.

We are so much used to immediate access to people we know that are we in a way then chained and prevented from such a simple freedom to be away from it all?

My friend now plans to sail the Northwest Passage in a small boat, which means being essentially out of electronic contact for about four months in the High Arctic. I can’t go along. My day job makes it impossible. I remain a prisoner of the BlackBerry nightmare.

Imagine disappearing from everything for four months; tough anymore, eh!

We go through life often with people with us, and rarely any extended periods by ourselves and away from civilization.  Perhaps we are rapidly losing any idea of what it means to be alone, by ourselves and without electronic contact?  Can't we be anonymous anymore?  The Pandavas have to happy that they had to spend the 13th year of the exile way back when, and not in the contemporary world! 

But, by the same token, does solitude help?

Solitude is enlightening but if it does not lead us back to society, it can become a spiritual dead end

Why?

‘No man is an island, entire of itself,’ wrote John Donne, in a too-often quoted line, but the full impact comes in the continuation of his meditation, where he writes:

every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

It is one of the great paradoxes of solitude, that it offers us not an escape, not a paradise, not a dwelling place where we can haughtily maintain our integrity by ignoring a vicious and corrupt social world, but a way back to that world, and a new motive for being there. Moreover, it can enliven a new sense of what companionship means — and, with it, a courtesy and hospitability that goes beyond anything good manners might decree. Because, no matter who I am, and no matter what I might or might not have achieved, my very life depends on being prepared, always, for the one visitor who never comes, but might arrive at any moment, from the woods or from the town.

It is a great paradox, indeed!