Migrations to Solitude, by Sue Halpern

Here’s another essay collection, this one from 1992 on the theme of solitude. Halpern says these pieces are not about the right to be left alone or protection of privacy but rather about “the experience of being left alone, or of not being left alone.”

In these essays she interviews, among others, a couple who have chosen to isolate themselves in the woods for 40 years, monks whose order has rules of silence, and a prisoner in and out of solitary confinement. Much has been written lately ab...