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By Root 1180 0

and discovers that with such a trained mind, no one can ever really be lost or alone. Boethius sat in a cell at the end of late antiquity, awaiting his death, and there wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, where Queen Philosophy came to him and helped him pass the time. Sweetly scolding his misery, she asks, “Do you really hold dear that kind of happiness that is destined to pass away?” All luck changes. What you need to be happy is a good conversation with your own mind, and prison is not merely unharmful to such a conversation, it might even be beneficial. Marcus Aurelius noted that having a self worth knowing was not only good for prison, it was also good for the absence of a vacation home. In fact, it was better than a vacation home: “Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains; and you too are wont to desire such things very much. But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever you choose to retire into yourself.”5

Consider this influential testimony from another age:

The chief reason for opening to every soul the doors to the whole round of human duties and pleasures is the individual development thus attained, the resources thus provided under all circumstances to mitigate the solitude that at times must come to everyone. I once asked Prince Krapotkin, a Russian nihilist, how he endured his long years in prison, deprived of books, pen, ink, and paper. “Ah,” he said, “I thought out many questions in which I had a deep interest. In the pursuit of an idea I took no note of time. When tired of solving knotty problems I recited all the beautiful passages in prose or verse I had ever learned. I became acquainted with myself and my own resources. I had a world of my own, a vast empire, that no Russian jailer or Czar could invade.” Such is the value of liberal thought and broad culture when shut off from all human companionship, bringing comfort and sunshine within even the four walls of a prison cell.

The speaker was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the speech is her famous 1892 address to Congress on the question of women’s education and political rights.6 I love the real-world example of a troubled girl that Stanton comes up with, clearly ripped from the headlines:

The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. What a touching instance of a child’s solitude; of that hunger of the heart for love and recognition, in the case of the little girl who helped to dress a Christmas tree for the children of the family in which she served. On finding there was no present for herself she slipped away in the darkness and spent the night in an open field sitting on a stone,and when found in the morning was weeping as if her heart would break…. The mention of her case in the daily papers moved many generous hearts to send her presents, but in the hours of her keenest suffering she was thrown wholly on herself for consolation.

This moment on the rock is maudlin, Victorian, and terrible. It’s such an odd setting for claiming a need for education. I suppose that’s why this speech is the classic that it is: no audience or reader ever expects Stanton to say this. They expect her to demand for women equal tools so we can work and live. Instead, the old lady is tired. She says, “To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us; we leave it alone under circumstances peculiar to ourselves…. We ask for the complete development of every individual, first, for his own benefit and happiness. In fitting out an army we give each soldier his own knapsack, arms, powder, his blanket, cup, knife, fork and spoon. We provide alike for all their individual necessities, then each man bears his own burden.” We have friends in history, and we have a friend in our own mind. Without knowledge or education “the solitude of the weak and the ignorant is indeed pitiable.