Solitude: Apocryphal Posts From Distant Archives
Last month saw the publication of the latest book from our classmate, Djelal Kadir, who was a “5-year BA” student originally part of ’68. Djelal retired in 2016 from Penn State as a highly accomplished scholar and thought leader in Comparative Literature.
This book is different from Djelal’s earlier academic books on the Americas, globalization, world literature, postcolonialism, modernism and literary theory. It springs from his own recent, personal experience and insights.
DJ, as his friends called him, was married a few hours after we graduated to Juana Celia Cohen, who happily shared life with Djelal until her death in 2019. Suddenly, without his companion of 50+ years, Djelal found himself alone — rattling around the large home they had in the Portland foothills, entertaining friends less frequently and directly experiencing a real aloneness.
Looking for insights, wisdom and comfort, Djelal activated the judgment and skill from his 50 years of teaching comparative literature. Having learned that in the depth of crisis one must plunge into the stillness at the core of the maelstrom, rather than fleeing to the spiraling edges, he dove deep into the historical, scientific, and mythical archive, finding instances of dire solitude.
He spent the next five years researching figures that found themselves in predicaments of solitude in extremis. His research allowed him to become familiar enough with these figures to assume their voice, giving expression to the plight of those 39 figures in 39 letters attributed to each one. The result is this volume, which the publisher describes as follows:
What is solitude? How does it manifest itself? How is solitude related to writing and reading? How do the core values of ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics manifest themselves in the face of solitude, whether in mythological time, in history, or in our own era of telecommunications and instant connectivity? This volume explores these questions and, by way of demonstration, dramatizes critical predicaments of solitude through thirty-nine letters.
The letters in this collection, ranging from mythological and epic antiquity through the twentieth century, are based on thorough scholarly research and written through the voices of mythical, literary, religious, scientific, and historical figures as the archival and documentary record allows us to understand them in their respective crises of extreme solitude. The letters aim to capture the perennial attempts to deal with the paradoxes of solitude as timeless, universal human condition, a condition most common, yet one that must be experienced alone. Each letter is introduced with an explanatory context—philological in the case of mythological figures, and historical when writers from the annals of history are purported to be writing.
This unusual and distinctive meditation on the pervasive phenomenon of solitude will resonate productively in the study of philosophy, literature, history, and the arts and humanities in general, as well as with readers who have considered or experienced solitude.
The book is available for sale here, in hardback and e-book formats.
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Djelal was also interviewed about Solitude in conjunction with a lecture he gave last year for Harvard’s 2024 Institute of World Literature, held in his native Cyprus: https://www.
In the interview, Djelal observes that people today are more solitary than ever, despite having the illusion of being connected through virtual realities, and that this solitude is exacerbated by the capitalization of teletechnologies which turned virtual communications into profits from the virality and the illusion of connectedness. (The interview goes much deeper into critiques of AI, capitalism, eurocentrism, imperialism and implications for culture, poetry, “home,” literature and resistance.)