“I have never in my life come across a good friend who is loyal to me as my solitude.”
(Henry David Thoreau)
Since the outbreak of the “Covid-19” crisis, millions around the world are only concerned about these weeks of how they can kill time in order to adhere to the home quarantine imposed in several countries until the crisis passes or a cure for the deadly virus is discovered in some cases, and while health systems globally are busy raising awareness By means of prevention and attempts to discover the appropriate antidote, the most important question in social circles is about the impact of voluntary or forced isolation on the lives of more than a billion people who live now?
And whether this isolation will redefine the way some will adjust to a new way of life that may last some time?
After all, no one knows when the treatment for the virus may be discovered or confined on its own, nor whether life will actually return to the way it was before it or not.
Debra Granic, the American filmmaker, answered part of these questions in 2018 when she directed the world the drama "Leave No Trace", which is based on the true story of a father and a former American soldier who, after returning from the war, decided to leave with his three-year-old daughter. Ten years old to the woods of Portland, Oregon;
He voluntarily abandons a stable, routine life in the city and among his peers returning from war where group therapy programs for people like himself suffer from one of the most well-known mental illnesses: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Life on the sidelines
Granic chooses a specific stage in her hero's life, without going into details of the past, whether it relates to the absent mother from the small family portrait, or to the war waged by Father Will (Ben Foster) and its impact is clearly seen in his training for daughter Tom (Thomasin MacKenzie) to escape And hiding from strangers or policemen who visit the park, as well as in the austere lifestyle, beginning with saving on fuel and not ending with wandering in the forest to hunt food from its plants and collecting water from its rain and dew on the leaves of trees.
The father does not mind taking his daughter to visit the city from time to time, but they are short and secret visits during which he is keen to hide the way to reach his camp in the forest while they go on foot to the city to stock up on food, fuel and psychotropic drugs that he does not take, but sells in search of a little money that he secures His needs, and while a few disagreements appear to be present between father and daughter, revolving around the difficult way of life that the girl did not choose, this does not negate her belonging to the jungle and considering it her home when things go wrong and the police find the family's secret hideout.
Tom shows an ability to quickly adapt to changes after being caught, and unlike Will, she has no problem answering questions from social workers about her way of life, and whether sleeping with her father in the same tent is causing her a problem or whether someone He had touched her body without her permission before?
There is no confusion in her that her father has provided her with her needs and a place to live in, and that "having two people in one tent makes it warmer at night," as she says in one of the film's clips.
Alyssa Wilkinson, film critic and editor of Vox, says, “Leave a Trace explores the economic and mental toll of living outside the system. They are forced to turn to their own communities for help and to create their own safety net.”
(1)
Will resorted to these private networks several times when he was selling his medicines for money, and again he will need them after he and his daughter escape from the shelter provided by social affairs for him to live and work, he will seek help from a truck driver on the road to take him to another place where he knows that no one will He searches for him, and as Tom and Tom begin a new life in another unknown forest, Tom will have to seek help from the inhabitants of the new forest when her father is injured and loses consciousness for a long time without knowing how to treat him.
"The heroes of Leave No Trace live a radical existence," describes them (2), "Peter Bradshaw," the Guardian's editor, and if they turn their backs on traditional life, they "know what is at stake," while the film's heroes preferred to live on the margins and separate from Society in its grand form, this experience was not and will not be the last for people who willingly decided to depart from traditional life, whether to escape from a painful past - such as war in the case of Will - or a desire to meditate and separate for a while from the crowded and accelerated pace of life. Rather, the film will open a way To discuss whether isolation - compulsion or voluntary - is one of the means capable of not only giving individuals time for contemplation and serenity, but also a way for creativity and excellence, and perhaps spread and universality at times.
out of style
"I went into the woods because I wanted to live carefully."
(Henry David Thoreau)
The positive impact of voluntary solitude can be seen in the life of the American author, poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who lived in America in the middle of the nineteenth century, and is now considered one of the brightest stars of the American classics because of his famous book “Walden, Life in the Woods,” in which he summarized a two-year experience he lived in solitary life The traditional lands and woods of Walden were owned by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thoreau's life was not bad financially in the era of the Mexican-American War and the calls for the liberation of slavery and civil disobedience that he has adopted since his famous article "Civil Disobedience" or "Resistance to Civil Government" was first published in 1849, but he nevertheless chose his own isolation, building his cabin with his own hands on Walden landed, and cultivated its surroundings with food to eat, while contenting himself with the fewest of needs, with which “cups of tea or coffee would become inferior pleasures (3) whenever he responded to her seduction,” as he will later narrate.
While Thoreau was not returning from a war that left a psychological impact on him, as happened to Lowell in Leave No Trace, he adopted his isolation as a supporter in his battle against the encroachment of the Industrial Revolution, and against a world based on “competitive progress,” as he called it, from which he called for the adoption of Radical freedom" as an antidote to the life of "quiet despair" that man has come to live.
Thoreau provided an example of how a man can live on so little;
Using this to arbitrate the restrictions of society, he rebelled against government policies that he refused to comply with.
During this, he was able, through an experience narrated in detail in his book "Walden", to prove his statement that money is not required to purchase a single necessity of the soul's needs, and that most of the luxuries, or the so-called "conveniences" in life, are not only unnecessary, but are considered a means of hindrance. To advance the human race.
Henry David Thoreau (Social Media)
Subsequently, in the 1960s, the Cuban poet Dulce Maria Leonaz joined Thoreau on the path of isolation, and immediately after the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro in 1959, and her accusation (4) of being loyal to the ousted regime led by Fulgencio Batista, Leonaz will decide to stay at her home in the capital, Havana without She leaves only a few times, and after many of her books were confiscated by the new revolutionary regime, Leonas will be forgotten by the world in her solitude for more than three decades before she was announced as the winner of the 1992 Spanish Cervantes Prize for Literature in her 90s.
Just as the works of Thoreau produced by solitude inspired global leaders and influencers, led by Mahatma Gandhi, the works of Leonaz and solitude will inspire artists and writers such as the novelist Jamie Attenberg to write (5) “All This Can Be Yours,” which, she says, polished – as she says – Leonaz’s poems establishing her understanding of solitude and solitude. For the difference between them.
Returning from death
Some choose solitude to meditate, to uphold one's principles, or as compulsion, but some choose it to rest after a long way of seeing and experiencing suffering, and in Don McCullin's case, the latter was closest to his condition.
The British photographer, who started his journalistic career since the early fifties by photographing the unemployed, the poor and gang members in British society, later specialized in photographing the war;
Traveling from the American invasion of Vietnam to the civil war in Cambodia, through the wars and conflicts in Chad, Uganda, Iran, Afghanistan and Lebanon, and to a long list of others, for several decades McCullin has worked to convey the horrors of war to the world with his camera.
It was until the early nineties (6) when McCullin turned to photographing nature and living in it, away from wars.
At the end of the same decade, and this time in Brazil, the world-famous photographer Sebastiao Salgado was preparing (7) with his wife to establish the "Terra Institute" on the farm land that Salgado inherited from his family, which he allocated to establish a nature reserve and to preserve part of the Atlantic Forest that witnessed his childhood.
But it wasn't just about protecting nature. Salgado had decided to take some time to recover from a years-long experience of photographing migrants and refugees around the world, one during which he "lost faith in humanity" (8), before nature brought him back to him.
This was during the years that Salgado worked with his wife to rebuild his farm in Brazil, which inspired him with hope in the ability of the planet and people with him to recover from long wars, famines, climate crises and other problems that have occurred and are occurring in the world, and made him then publish in 2013 his book The black and white Genesis photographer depicts people displaced by wars and climatic disasters, calling it a "massive love letter" to the earth.
The trauma that Salgado suffered seems to be the closest to the one that Will faced in “Leave No Trace”, although it is not clear or known what happened to the latter, but this does not negate that the experience of isolation is sometimes stimulating and stimulating to creativity and to complete the course of life with faith Greater is humanity's ability to recover, and that breaking out of the norm, and even living outside the safe net of society, may in some cases be the only way left to survive.