Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness [Hardcover]

Robert Kull (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2008

Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia’s coastal wilderness with supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he’d been seeking all his life. With only a cat and his thoughts as companions, he wrestled with inner storms while the forces of nature raged around him. The physical challenges were immense, but the struggles of mind and spirit pushed him even further.

Solitude is the diary of Kull’s tumultuous year as well as a meditation on the tensions between nature and technology, isolation and society. With humor and brutal honesty, Kull explores the pain and longing we typically avoid in our busy lives as well as the peace and wonder that arise once we strip away our distractions.

Kull went into solitude seeking the Answer, but came back empty-handed. Wilderness, he found, is a place to clearly see the insanity of denying that the world is as it is. He discovered that life itself teaches us all we need to know — once we pause to really listen.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

For his Ph.D. dissertation, Kull built a cabin in the Patagonian wilderness with the intention of studying the effect of deep wilderness solitude on a human being, and this account chronicles the tortures and gifts of a year spent in near-total isolation. Kull intersperses methodological and contextual chapters between the journal's month-by-month entries, and while these chapters are informative (describing a 'tradition' of solitaries and hermits, surveys of the various cultural understandings of solitude), they do little to alleviate the sound of one man worrying. Only when the author refrains from taking his mental, emotional and spiritual temperature, writing instead about his physical explorations and observations of the surrounding area, does the narrative achieves a sense of spaciousness and relief. Kull writes that he wants to encourage others... to welcome the darkness, difficulty, and fear, but it is when he himself does this that the resultant journal entries become relaxed, expansive and enlightening. He studies ducks that defend territory outside his cabin, tracks the slow movements of limpets and explores pristine inlets and a glacier; these episodes and the accompanying insights, however, may arrive too late for some readers. (Oct.)
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Review

“Bob Kull has done something relatively rare in the modern world: He has made a retreat/journey/pilgrimage that suits his own need and desire. He has learned essential lessons, and like a good spiritual adventurer, he is letting us in on the lessons he learned. Although his adventure is fascinating, it is his inner discoveries that appeal to me. It is worth everything for him to say that he is not a hero and his adventure is not heroic. That is just what we desperately need today: nonheroic adventures. This is an amazing story, worth reading and being inspired by. Bob is like a modern shaman, going out and coming back. And readers can take a good portion of Bob’s experience into themselves and be changed by it.”
— Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul

“Though grittier and more masculine than Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, it has something of the same appeal.”
— The Vancouver Sun

“There are echoes of Jack London here. Echoes of Thoreau, too....Very few of us will ever travel to the tip of Chile, let alone try to camp out there alone for a year. But what Bob really is writing about is a spiritual challenge as close as our own heartbeats.”
— David Crumm, ReadTheSpirit.com

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: New World Library (September 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1577316320
• ISBN-13: 978-1577316329
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #650,954 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Narcissism on Display, December 12, 2009

By 

A Reader "ever curious" (WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness (Hardcover)

What a disappointment. I too am a fan of solitary adventures, both my own and those of others. There are some magnificent books in which people faced the elements and their own nature and came out the victor. This is not one. This is a story of a man child. His grasp of Buddhism, which he pursues quite avidly, is shallow at best.

His relationship with his cat is frankly unbearable. He abuses the cat relentlessly, and lest remorse enter into his consciousness, he creates the idea that the cat enjoys being abused. Since the cat remains affectionate when not having cold water thrown in it's face or being immersed in a mud puddle, he seems to conclude that this indicates the positive nature of their relationship. Traumatic bonding, Mr. Kull, search that on your google engine.

Do yourself a favor and find a wilderness adventure where the author has gained the status of adult maturity.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tale of a hard journey - mentally and physically, October 24, 2008

By 

team W "teamw23" (Silver Spring, MD United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness (Hardcover)

Resolved: Our complex, modern society may provide us with a host of comforts and conveniences, but it has also stolen from us at the same time. The modern world insulates us from the true meaning life and what it means to be human. We need to step back and contemplate both the natural world and ourselves far more deeply if we want to understand the true nature of reality and our place in the universe.

I think many even modestly self-aware people have at least fleeting thoughts along those lines, but few act seriously on them. For me a long hike in the woods or paddling a canoe at first light across a mirror-still lake is probably as close to such an experience as I'll ever have. But Dr. Kull takes this sentiment and runs it to ground. In search of spiritual enlightenment, he packs up and sets off to live, all alone, on a remote, uninhabited island in Southern Chile for an entire year. He builds himself a little cabin and lives self-sufficiently for the year. While there he struggles with both the physical challenges of surviving, as well as the spiritual and emotional turmoil of both trying to find higher purpose and being utterly alone.

The book is a mixture of his actual journal entries, written while he was there and more traditional chapters that reflect on some of the broader issues he encountered. While the result of this technique is not exactly a cleanly-flowing, unified piece of literature, it does open a raw, unflinching window into what such an experience would actually be like, particularly the emotional and mental anguish as Dr. Kull struggles to find the enlightenment he seeks.

If you liked Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World or Richard Proenneke's story of living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, realize that while the subject matter is facially similar, this is a very different kind of book, which is focused far more on the spiritual and mental aspects of long-term wilderness solitude. Dr. Kull is a bit of a tortured soul, and so what he lays bare for the rest of us to see isn't always pretty or happy, but it is honest and enlightening.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Touching, January 8, 2010

By 

Brooke Oates "Tin Bird" (VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness (Paperback)

For some reason it seems that many of the previous reviewers of this book went into it thinking it was going to be the feel good story of the year. They chide the author for being selfish, cruel, insensitive...shame on you Bob Kull for being human and being willing to tell us about it. Please continue to seek.