Writing is a solitary occupation.
Family, friends, and society are
the natural enemies of the writer.
He must be alone,
uninterrupted, and slightly savage
if he is to sustain and
complete an undertaking.
Jessamyn West
I do not doubt what Jessamyn West writes. People can be the natural enemy of the writer. I know that to be true. More than once I lived alone in a single-room hermitage in a woods, without any human conversation, as I labored on a book. I suppose what she described is true—anyone who would act in this way must be slightly savage. While I wince at accepting that word, I understand the underlying truth.
I’ve been a photographer almost as long as I’ve been a writer, so I confess to dual savagery. While some photography depends upon having other people around, the type I do calls for naming the natural enemy and running in the opposite direction.
There is another way of describing this, a friendlier way. It’s the need for aloneness, for solitude. The need to see through your own eyes, not someone else’s. The need to have your own visceral responses to what you come upon, not checking to see if anyone else feels the same way.
So yesterday I drove to Chain O’ Lakes Park, thirty miles northeast. Except for a couple of ice fishermen, I had all those hundreds of acres to myself. I don’t believe I could have photographed that silence, that pale winter haze, those barren branches in the same way if others were nearby, however benign their presence.
