How To Be Alone (School Of Life) - Plot & Excerpts
FreedomWe value ‘freedom’ very highly in our society. Perhaps for the first time in history we speak of it as an absolute and unalienable right for every human being. Sometimes I think we see it as so obviously a good and necessary quality of life that we do not examine what we mean by it.But it is not really that simple. In the first place freedom has two dimensions: there is ‘freedom from’ – from things you dislike, that bind or limit you (poverty, pain or fear, for example). And there is ‘freedom to’, which is, I think, the more important, the more joyful and the more enriching. It seems that the American Declaration of Independence was trying to draw this distinction between the two when it separated ‘liberty’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’.And it is this second dimension of freedom which has been associated with solitude – first to work out what you desire to be free to do, and then to imagine and create the doing of it. In The Stations of Solitude, the philosopher Alice Koller defined freedom as ‘Not only having no restraints, but also being self-governing according to laws of your own choosing … where your choices spring from a genuine sense of what your life is and can become.’ In this short passage she moves from ‘no restraints’ (freedom from) to being ‘self-governing’ (freedom to).
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