Amanda Fulford, Edge Hill University: Solitude: Encounter, Communion and Revealing in Shepherd and Thoreau
The third ISRS (International Society for Research on Solitude) Seminar took place on the 9th July 2021. Prof Amanda Fulford from the Edge Hill University presented the theme ‘Solitude: Encounter, Communion and Revealing in Shepherd and Thoreau’. There were participants from Australia, Poland, the UK, and the USA.
Professor Fulford by sharing her research on the two fascinating ‘solitude writers’ – the 19th nineteenth-century American philosopher, essayist and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, and Anna (Nan) Shepherd, the 20th twentieth-century author and poet. Both inspiringly disrupted common notions of solitude. In their main works (‘Walden’ and ‘The Living Mountain’) solitude is understood in the context of encounter, communion and revealing. The meeting with radical, non-human otherness; communion with Nature, making a person “defenseless”; revealing – by bringing the ordinary into presence through a simple shifting of our perspective. Experiencing this kind of solitude doesn’t require escaping into the wild: it might be possible by entanglement with our world and ‘attentive attention’.
The presentation was followed by a vivid (and peaceful) discussion. The questions regarded (among others) anthropocentric meaning of solitude and loneliness, qualitative distinctions between contact with human and nature, and the differences between structured and unstructured experiences of solitude.
We encourage you to look at the recording, published below.