Abstract
The aloneness of creativity is quite unlike other solitudes. Time spent writing and thinking is time spent “away,” in a kind of exile from the daily clamor of life. For the migrant spirit of Emily Brontë’s poem, to be “most away” is to seek more than distance from the distractions of sociality. It is to slip out of existence for a while—to savor a kind of reprieve from a human location in things. “Wandering wide” the free spirit feels itself distributed through regions undetermined by the familiar co-ordinates of earth and sky. Night winds stir the starscape, tempting the wanderer with the promise of other suns. There is something both disarming and familiar about this freedom, as if in our creative solitude we reconnect with those domains guessed at and half-glimpsed in dreams.