Migrations to Solitude: The Quest for Privacy in a Crowded World

(Paperback)

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Profoundly original essays from the author of Summer Hours at the Robbers Library about the nature of solitude and privacy in a culture where ourlaws, technology, and lifestyles are increasingly chipping away at them both.

Why do we often long for solitude but dread loneliness What happens when the walls we build around ourselves are suddenly removedor made impenetrable If privacy is something we can count as a basic right, why are chipping it away

These are some of the themes that Sue Halpern eloquently explores in these essays. In pursuit of the riddle of solitude, Halpern talks to Trappist monks and secular hermits, corresponds with a prisoner in solitary confinement, and visits and AIDS hospice and a shelter for the homeless places where privacy is thefirstand perhaps the most essentialthing to go. This is a book that lends weight to the ideas that have become dangerously abstract in a society of data bases and car faxes, a guide not only to the routes of solitude but to the selves we discover only when we arrive there.

Author Bio

SUE HALPERN received her doctorate from Oxford University in 1985 and rst began teaching at Columbia Universitys College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is the author of Four Wings and a Prayer, Migrations to Solitude, and two books of ction. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Cond Nast Traveler, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. She lives in Ripton, Vermont, with her husband, writer Bill McKibben, and their daughter, Sophie, and is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College.