Spaces of Creative Solitude
Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich once noted:"Our language has wisely sensed these two sides of being alone. It has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone" (1963, The Eternal Now).
This page is dedicated to resistance of loneliness through widening our intimate spaces of transnational solitude through creative writing, art and cinema.
By transnational solitude I mean spaces where different cultural identities meet in personal strive to resist "lonely crowd" of nationalism and xenophobia. The term "transnational" was coined by philosopher Randolph Bourne: “Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university to-day to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of to-day. He breathes a larger air. In his new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself citizen of a larger world” (Trans-National America, 1916).
