Victor Villas reviewed The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor
Unfulfilled Expectations
3 stars
The blurb was very promising, some of which I was interested in - " this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life" - and a bunch of which I'm not very enthusiastic about - "spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca."
I understand that when Huxley published his accounts of psychedelics, Bachelor's generation ate that like hot cake because it was a brave new world to behold. We're just in a different zeitgeist now, and I could not be less interested in personal accounts of someone experimenting psychedelic rituals. I admire his secular buddhism, but that admiration wasn't enough to color this reading with anything of interest to me.
Another big chunk of the book is dedicated to indirectly reading Montaigne, which is not something object because I do …
The blurb was very promising, some of which I was interested in - " this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life" - and a bunch of which I'm not very enthusiastic about - "spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca."
I understand that when Huxley published his accounts of psychedelics, Bachelor's generation ate that like hot cake because it was a brave new world to behold. We're just in a different zeitgeist now, and I could not be less interested in personal accounts of someone experimenting psychedelic rituals. I admire his secular buddhism, but that admiration wasn't enough to color this reading with anything of interest to me.
Another big chunk of the book is dedicated to indirectly reading Montaigne, which is not something object because I do enjoy "reading" all sorts of buddhist teachings via Batchelor's lenses, but it was not as engaging as I hoped. We know a lot more about Montaigne than we know about masters of the distant past, and the fallibility of a real person does a real number on how impactful their teaching is. I cannot reconcile with a man who alleges radical agnosticism a la Socrates and uses that as a basis to defend social norm conservatism, the cognitive dissonance is too violent. I don't know why Batchelor would include such a section in the book if not to undermine the virtues of Montaigne. Was it just the fruit of collage randomness?
