Let's Talk Books Episode 15: Solitude with Robin Van Auken

Let's Talk Books with Robin Van Auken

Today I try out a new software platform for recording podcasts, Anchor, and experiment with recording smaller audio clips, transitions, and putting together a show on the fly. I've done this to test the system and to see if I want to use it in an upcoming communications class I teach at Lycoming College. I also discuss an amazing book, "How to Be Alone," by Sara Maitland, a handbook on solitude and why it's important for people, particularly those individuals with introversion qualities. If you're an introverted person, pick up this book and learn how to accept the fact that being with people 24/7 makes you crazy. If you're an extroverted person, pick up the book so you can understand that loner in your life, and why you really need to give her or him space. Maitland writes about silence and solitude and why she lives in a small cottage on a backroad on a Scottish moor: “What changed was that I got fascinated by silence; by what happens to the human spirit, to identity and personality when the talking stops, when you press the off button, when you venture out into that enormous emptiness. I was interested in silence as a lost cultural phenomenon, as a thing of beauty and as a space that had been explored and used over and over again by different individuals, for different reasons and with wildly differing results.”