

# The Infrastructure of Solitude

I want to open with Thoreau because he's the obvious choice but also the right one—he is, after all, the patron saint of anyone who has ever imagined that the antidote to modern life might be a small cabin, a woodstove, and the luxury of one's own silence. But what we remember about Thoreau is not what he actually wrote about his time at Walden, which was that the cabin was never as isolated as the legend suggests: friends walked out to see him, his mother brought food, neighbors stopped by for conversation, and the railroad whistle sounded through the trees as regularly as a church bell. The solitude was real, but it was undergirded by an infrastructure of care and connection that the mythology has always elided, because the myth requires it. What we wanted—what we still want—was not a true accounting of how one person lived alone in the woods for two years, but a story about what solitude can make of a mind unburdened by the social. The fantasy has never been about the actual cabin; it's about what the cabin represents, which is the belief that clarity of thought arises from removal from the world rather than engagement with it.

The contemporary fantasy of remote work—in which we imagine that liberation might be found in a home office, a cabin in the woods, a life arranged at sufficient distance from the noise of collective endeavor—is downstream of this older American myth, and it carries the same structural flaw. We imagine that the worker who logs off from the Zoom call and steps into silence has achieved something like what Thoreau achieved, which is to say: we imagine that the silence itself is the achievement. But the silence is never just silence, and the solitude is never merely the absence of others. There is always an infrastructure that makes it possible—the systems and supports and material conditions that allow one person to be alone while others are not, that permit withdrawal from the social without paying its full cost. The fantasy of the isolated genius has always been, in this sense, a fantasy about infrastructure: it is the story we tell ourselves about what makes solitude possible while pretending that nothing made it possible at all.