Being Alone
There were doubts and criticisms in my mind as I listened to this account of the life of Gordonstown, but there was no doubt that I envied some of its opportunities and activities and that I agreed at least from the outward point of view with a great deal of what it encouraged. But few schools can ever expect to have precisely these stirring opportunities, the opportunities provided by the sea and a wild stormy coast. There is, however, one thing we ought all to provide, the opportunity to be alone, and indeed the encouragement to be alone. I was surprised recently to be told that at a certain university hostel students from boarding schools were more appreciative of the privacy and quiet of rooms of their own than were students from day schools. The latter had become so used to doing everything in the publicity of a noisy home with wireless and television on most of the time that they could not easily adopt (sic) themselves to working and thinking in private, and to being alone.
For our characters, for our growth to maturity we must have the experience of being alone – alone for long periods, perhaps. But the value of this will depend on what use we make of our aloneness, and on what purpose we teachers, in encouraging it, think it ought to serve. Not only men and women of noble character, but also villains and criminals have made use of periods of aloneness, each to his different purpose. Let us think of some of the things a boy or girl might do at such a time. One boy may have a clear idea of what sort of person he ought to be or is expected to be, and he may when he is alone with himself be continually testing himself out to make sure he will come up to scratch. He may have some definite task ahead and make use of his periods of quiet to muster his spiritual reserves – which of course may be either good or evil. Another may dream dreams and indulge in fantasies without there being much connection between these and what he actually strives for in his daily life. He may in fact give himself the spurious satisfaction of imagining in his lonely fantasies all the success that he knows he cannot achieve in practice. Yet others will use their periods of aloneness in serious thought about what they want to make of life and their duty to others. Times of quiet for them may be used to strengthen the feeling of dedication to a worthy task. Others in times of quiet and privacy my struggle with a feeling of desperate inadequacy in face of the demands that life is making on them, and may search in the silence of their hearts for the help that will make them strong.
Now most of these ways of using aloneness are clearly strenuous. They sound like hard work – except perhaps the idle dreams. Because they are strenuous they are often not what the personality needs. Certainly there are crises in the lives of people when their spirits, faced by some terrible need or demand, has to wrestle in what is sometimes agony. Jesus went through such experiences. But he also in his loneliness discovered peace, an assurance of love and support. In the aloneness that I want every boy and girl to have I want them some times to lose the sense of strain and effort and anxiety, to reach through these to peace and relaxation of mind, because it is in this condition that we make the most valuable discoveries, the discoveries that give us strength and assurance and knowledge. That sounds all wrong, doesn’t it? Surely we get strength through strenuous effort, knowledge by grasping for it? Nevertheless what I have said is true.
I know that there are many children in the school who need to learn to be alone and who need peace of mind. I see them running after each other, bewildered and disturbed the moment they find themselves left alone in a room, embarrassed when silence falls upon a group and rushing in to fill the apparent void with chatter. I know that they need something but it is something they cannot get by straining. The nearest I can do by talking – and that can never be much – is perhaps to persuade them to be quiet and to let something happen to them.
In the surroundings of this school we have at least the countryside – the wide Yorkshire plains with its excellent farming, woods that are full of birds and other wild life, two rivers, and not so far away the moors that are wholly untamed and wild. The school may be noisy, there may be no unoccupied room that one can retire to, but we can be “alone with nature”, I am not using the expression in any sentimental sense. I am simply thinking of someone going out into a field or a wood or finding his way on to the moors, alone. I am interested in what happens to him, for we have long periods of free time at week-ends that can be used in this way.
Let’s think of some of the attitudes that some people show when they get out into the countryside. I think of a man sitting by a stream.
But he hears no music in the rushing water. His mind’s eye sees its energy harnessed to a water wheel. A mill grows round it. So a place of music and beauty becomes a hideous factory town where people live cramped lives in ugly little houses under an almost permanent cloud of smoke. For this man, nature is not to be listened to, or enjoyed, it is to be exploited, used as power and material. During the holidays I passed through a terrible place called Peacehaven, a straggling bungalow slum that covers what was once a lovely stretch of downland between Brighton and Newhaven, where the chalk cliffs drop sheer down to the sea. A well-known newspaper was responsible for this horror, popularising it as a sort of memorial and peace-time gesture after the first world-war. It seemed a fine money-making opportunity for the speculative builder, but when it ceased, as it soon did, to offer any promising cash returns it was dropped, to remain nothing but a memorial – miles of it – to man’s utter insensitiveness. Yet the appeal in the first place was supposedly to the beauty of the natural surroundings. A beautiful bungalow in one of nature’s beauty spots!
Archive reference PP/KCB 3/7/3 document 32