Jana Misk

In Rilke's famous letters to a young poet, he mentions frequently the importance of solitude for an artist's soul:

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours--that is what you must be able to attain. . . . Only the individual who is solitary is placed under the deepest laws like a Thing, and when he walks out into the rising dawn or looks out into the event-filled evening and when he feels what is happening there, all situations drop from him as if from a dead man, though he stands in the midst of pure life.

Though he continues to serve as a patron saint of contemporary artists who need permission to withdraw from the chaos of everyday life, Rilke himself didn't seem like an especially enviable character. He was plagued by his sensitivity to the world, suffering any time he came into contact with the event-filled evening and all of its concomitant feelings. And he didn't even have billboards, cell phones, and Twitter to deal with.

Still, despite constant social pressures to "participate," "have some fun," and "get dressed once in a while," life can yet be enjoyable for the reclusive among us in the modern world. It just takes some work.

Personally, I often get stuck ruminating ("perseverating," one of my blissfully World-of-Warcraft-addicted ex-boyfriends used to call it) about how seriously to take these accusations that I need to leave the house more often, that I'm letting life pass me by, etc. But who's to say? I tend to take as authorities figures like Rilke, Jung, my therapist, and New Scientist magazine--and yet the line between healthy introversion and shut-in status still looks frustratingly blurred.

Thus the weekly column you are now reading: a project of cataloging Stuff I Like About the World--stuff that either validates my introversion, or else makes me feel less freakish by inspiring me to declare, "This is worth going outside for!" (Keep in mind that, for me, what counts as "going outside" includes crossing the parking lot to get into my car, ordering a burrito at Chipotle, and, on some days, descending to the apartment complex's basement to do laundry.) Positive thinking is a good skill for me to practice, anyway.

And so we begin with my current favorite introverted self-indulgence, and also one of my aforementioned authoritative sources on the degree to which my introversion is healthy: New Scientist magazine.

I first heard about New Scientist when I was in Germany (yes, I went abroad, for two whole months--but I survived only by being drunk the entire time). One of my newfound drinking buddies was a quiet chemistry PhD who had completed his degree at Berkeley. Prior to my two months in Europe spent pretending to master the language of Nietzsche (I got thirty-four pages into Also Sprach Zarathustra--but they were thirty-four excellent pages), I had taken to reading books like Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality. I was indeed searching for reality, using science to cope with a deep "I'm twenty years old, where the hell is my life going?"-style depression during the day while spending my evenings dozing to marathons of The Osbournes. This string of events is the only reason I can think of for having gotten into a discussion about a science magazine with a fellow alcoholic. Some years later, while recovering from a breakup that threw me into another depression, I treated myself to a year of scientifically supported optimism.

An annual subscription (52 issues) is $72 if you order online. If you're concerned about paper consumption or haven't yet gotten sick of staring at a monitor for 60 to 90 percent of your waking life, the New Scientist offers an outrageously reasonable online-only subscription option. But I prefer the paper version--it's nice to feel distantly connected to the world without the use of a keyboard. (Reading the newspaper doesn't quite fill this role for me--I find the experience too similar to shopping an Ikea sale.)

If you spend a lot of time alone at home, and you don't have pesky friends who invite you out (or even if you do), having a few issues of New Scientist lying around is multiply useful.

1. First of all, you're pretty much guaranteed to read most of each issue of the weekly periodical, so you won't feel ashamed that you're wasting your money, and you'll be accomplishing at least one concrete thing each week even if you spend the rest of your time contemplating the yellowjacket corpse that's been caught in your window screen since last summer.
2. Second, if someone actually happens to come over and sees your stack of smart-looking magazines, s/he will be impressed: "Wow, [your name] must be a genius! S/he must be doing really important things alone in this apartment all the time. Now I feel less miffed that s/he never returns my phone calls."
3. Finally, it's a great prop to take out with you on those occasions when you're forced to leave your apartment, so that people will think you're serious in that marginally acceptable academic kind of way, and your aloofness may be partially forgiven.

This morning I had the chance to find a new use for my subscription. My boyfriend, having had a rough (decidedly extraverted) night, woke up feeling too ill to do anything other than sprawl on the couch in his underwear and nibble toast, so I entertained us both by reading article snippets to him. Though I basically did nothing this morning except make tea, I at least learned a few things, e.g. that, due to global warming, coral reef bacteria may stop producing a certain gas that contributes to cloud cover for the region, which could lead to the imminent destruction of Australian rainforests. Also, mammals that live in trees tend to live longer than their "ground-bound cousins." Now it's pretty hard for you to tell me that I wasted my day, isn't it?

While topics in the magazine range from technology to health to space exploration, I don't have too much trouble relating some of the content to my own cloistered existence. Notable discoveries:

1. Sexual activity is better at relieving stress when you do it with another person. (This tidbit unfortunately led to my first marriage, but in rough times it still encourages me to seek human contact.)
2. People who read cognitive behavioral therapy-oriented self-help books tend to feel more depressed after finishing the book than they did before. (Those CBT folks are so silly. As if they could reason me out of my bad mood!)
3. A recent study has shown that feelings of happiness may make people behave more selfishly. (So many places to go with this...)

The clincher for my unwavering support of this publication: I've never had anyone from the New Scientist subscriptions office terrorize me with human contact, even in the form of a phone call.