solitude

It's Sunday evening and I'm alone, churning out another blog post. They say writing is one of the loneliest work there is. Not really. It is a solitary activity--physically, but here, imagination's your only limit. You can travel anywhere, go back in time, be anyone you want.

There's one place I can think of where a writer will be very productive. Prison. You're confined, there's tons of material, minimal distractions and plenty of time to think. Anybody familiar with Misery? Yep. There's even a literary genre called Prison Literature which, as the name implies, are works written when the author was in prison or under house arrest. Someone even made a list of top ten books written in prison.

Two great books under this genre are, "Don Quixote" and "A journey around my room". It's interesting that in Don Quixote, the author escapes to Spain with his knight, going on adventures and fighting windmills; but in A journey around my room, the author relishes his confinement. He was in house arrest for six weeks and during that time, he wrote about the furniture, paintings and decorations in his room. He related these to his life, and in doing so, his memories and reflections surface.

Aside from writing, here's another thing you can do in prison:


When we're alone, what we have is that very limited and very precious commodity, time. We don't realize it at first, so we kill time: games, tv, etc. Eventually, we get bored. So we think, we imagine and soon, we look around and work at something. We're standing on fertile ground. In solitude begins Creation.