Steps to Solitude: Alone at the Castle Above Stuttgart

There is a particular quiet that only settles when a place is empty. I found it on the road up to Solitude Castle in Stuttgart, on an afternoon when the paths belonged to me and the city felt much further away than it was.

I had gone for the castle. I stayed for the silence.

The Solitude Castle.

The road up

The walk is not dramatic. Empty roads, low buildings, a few trees, and then the palace appearing above the slope. What made it memorable was the absence of other people: no queue at the gate, no voices on the path, nothing to organise. I could hear my own steps, and after a while I stopped thinking about where I was going.

From the top the hills and the river open out. Standing there, the scale of everything changes. You are a speck in a wide landscape, and oddly that is a comfort rather than a worry. The mind agrees with the view: the world is enormous, and you are small, and it is fine.

A feeling I first had at nine

Crowds and company, I have come to think, are partly a story we agree to believe. A useful story, most of the time. But underneath it the truth is that you are on your own, and the company of other people is something you pass through rather than something you possess.

I first sensed that when I was nine, surrounded by people all the time. It did not make me sad. It was more like noticing a floor beneath a carpet. Later, as the years went by, people began to disperse in twos and threes, following their own desires or their work, and the strange sense of isolation came back to me for a moment. I knew then that I was alone, whatever the room looked like.

Steps to Solitude

The path is empty and the light is low,
and for once nobody knows where I am.
Below, the valley keeps its river and its hills;
I am one small thing among many small things.
Company is a story we agree to tell —
a warm one, but a story.
I learned this at nine, in a crowded room,
and I have been relearning it since.
People leave in pairs, in threes,
following their own work and wanting.
The road continues without them.
I keep walking, looking for the quiet
that never asks where I have been.

Steps to Solitude.

What I took away

Now I walk the empty streets and look for inner peace, because I am tired of being surrounded by crowds, of the false sense of security they give, and of the misleading people who ask where I am and why. The castle was only the destination. The walk was the point: a stretch of road where nobody needed anything from me, and the only company was the landscape.

Solitude is not the same as loneliness, though the two use the same road. One is a choice you make on an empty afternoon; the other is imposed on you. I went up the hill for the first and came down grateful for it.