Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness

<div>Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia&#8217;s coastal wilderness with supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he&#8217;d been seeking all his life. With only a cat and his thoughts as companions, he wrestled with inner storms while the forces of nature raged around him. The physical challenges were immense, but the struggles of mind and spirit pushed him even further.<br><br> <i>Solitude</i> is the diary of Kull&#8217;s tumultuous year as well as a meditation on the tensions between nature and technology, isolation and society. With humor and brutal honesty, Kull explores the pain and longing we typically avoid in our busy lives as well as the peace and wonder that arise once we strip away our distractions.<br><br>Kull went into solitude seeking the <i>Answer</i> , but came back empty-handed. Wilderness, he found, is a place to clearly see the insanity of denying that the world is as it is. He discovered that life itself teaches us all we need to know &#151; once we pause to really listen.</div>

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Kull built a cabin in the Patagonian wilderness with the intention of studying the effect of deep wilderness solitude on a human being, and this account chronicles the tortures and gifts of a year spent in near-total isolation. Kull intersperses methodological and contextual chapters between the journal's month-by-month entries, and while these chapters are informative (describing a 'tradition' of solitaries and hermits, surveys of the various cultural understandings of solitude), they do little to alleviate the sound of one man worrying. Only when the author refrains from taking his mental, emotional and spiritual temperature, writing instead about his physical explorations and observations of the surrounding area, does the narrative achieves a sense of spaciousness and relief. Kull writes that he wants to encourage others... to welcome the darkness, difficulty, and fear, but it is when he himself does this that the resultant journal entries become relaxed, expansive and enlightening. He studies ducks that defend territory outside his cabin, tracks the slow movements of limpets and explores pristine inlets and a glacier; these episodes and the accompanying insights, however, may arrive too late for some readers. (Oct.)
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