What good is solitude?

It's
a new year, with new opportunities to banter around familiar clichés such as
"taking time on the journey," cultivating "spirituality but not religion" and
"going on retreat." Most of us agree that solitude is key to all of these
endeavors, and that solitude is a good thing.

Yet
like the above expressions, the concept of solitude could use some fresh air. We
tend to think we know what solitude is: it means leaving one's work for "time
away," right? And we're pretty sure that solitude means being alone: it can't
be experienced with anyone else, right?

William
Deresiewicz plays with these assumptions. Back in 2008, Deresiewicz wrote an essay for The American Scholar in which he says that "the ability to engage
in introspection. . . is the essential precondition for living an intellectual
life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude."