PARTI
GETTING STARTED
1
PRISONS WE MAKE FOR OURSELVES
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
When you have shut your doors, and darkened your room, remember never to say you are alone, for you are not alone, but God is within, and your genius is within.
Epictetus, Discourses
When people are in pain and most need others, many wall themselves in. This very human tendency is illustrated by a famous story.
In 1934, Admiral Richard Byrd led an expedition to Antarctica, where he established a base on the edge of the Ross Ice Barrier, 700 miles north of the South Pole. Byrd then decided to set up a small weather observation post closer to the pole, which he chose to man alone. He would stay in a one-room cabin, a box that measured nine feet by thirteen feet, lowered into a rectangular hole cut into the ice to protect the cabin from gale-force winds during the coming winter months.
Byrd was committing himself to a degree of personal isolation few men have ever taken on. What happened to him in the months ahead reveals something important to psychologists that all of us should bear in mind.