The Art of Solitude - by Zachary Seager (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Designed to appeal to the book lover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautifully bound pocket-sized gift editions of much loved classic titles. Bound in real cloth, printed on high quality paper, and featuring ribbon markers and gilt edges, Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure. This edition is edited and introduced by writer and academic, Zachary Seager.

In a world where we're more connected than ever, why is it that we're also more lonely? Dip into this anthology of classic writing to reclaim the pleasure of your own company.

The Art of Solitude shows some of the myriad ways in which people throughout history have understood their experiences of the solitary life, or have counselled others to benefit from solitude. It contains poetry, essays, autobiographical pieces and short stories from writers such as Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Walso Emerson. These diverse works can teach us how to think in freedom, how to enjoy a profound inner life and how best to cope with the fact that, as the novelist Joseph Conrad put it, we live, as we dream--alone. Above all, they show how we might truly connect with ourselves and, in the process, how we can meaningfully connect with those around us, including the earth itself. Looked at in this way, solitude is always focused both outward and inward, towards the self and towards the world. The cure for loneliness is, in the end, the art of solitude.

About the Author

Zachary Seager is an author and academic and so spends a lot of time alone. He is based in Oxford.

Selected writings by: Kamo no Chomei, Michel de Montaigne, René Descartes, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Edgar Allen Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Emily Dickinson, Alice Meynell and Virginia Woolf.