To the uninitiated, the words abstinence and divestment may connote a sense of deprivation or sacrifice. When applied to a person, they bring to mind someone who has given up, for example, salt, sugar, alcohol, smoking, or sex—and has thereby consigned themselves to a dry, joyless fate. Not so, in my experience.
In my new book, The Dry Season, I recount how, in my mid-30s, after 20 years of nonstop committed relationships, I decided to spend some time being intentionally celibate. I knew I needed to take stock of and change my romantic patterns, and ended up going a year not only without sex, but without all the attendant activities, including dating and flirting.
The great surprise of that period wasn’t how it changed my outlook on love and sex, but how enjoyable it was. For 20 years I had been relentlessly falling in and out of love, and withdrawing from those obsessions meant devoting my recouped attention to other passions: friends, family, activism, art. I read more books and went dancing more often that year than during any other in my life. Even mundane experiences came into more vivid focus: I was taken by the tang of fresh raspberries and the crispness of clean bedsheets, along with the sweet freedom of solitude. I had always looked for the sublime in lovers, but in their absence I found it everywhere.
Writing a book on the abundance of that year got me thinking about all the other kinds of reneging I’ve experienced, and how many of them led to unforeseen delights. As a young addict, I thought that my artistic practice relied on drugs and alcohol, only to find that my work bloomed in recovery. Similarly, when I gave up obsessive control of my eating habits, I began to truly relish food again. Rather than grimly depriving us, purposeful refusal can open us to all the bounty we have been forgoing. This realignment applies not only to attachments that rise to the level of addiction, but also to idle penchants or habits that we seek repetitively for comfort. The six books below describe other forms of abundance found, counterintuitively, through abstinence.
Fasting for Ramadan, by Kazim Ali
This lucid memoir originated from a journal that Ali kept while fasting during one Ramadan, and it retains the intimacy of that private beginning while evolving into a resonant meditation on hunger and worship. In the opening he writes, “One feels, at the end of a day of fasting, like a tree branch or a bone bleached in the sun.” Readers will find sensual pleasure in his sumptuous writing about hunger, its passing, and what swells to fill that space; his tremendous poetic gifts capture that richness. “I will miss the feeling of emptiness that foodlessness offers me,” he admits later. “I will miss the weird focus that comes from removing consideration of this huge thing from my mental space.” In anticipation of swearing off something, we typically focus on what we give up or will lack. But the experience so often reveals the things we’ve been neglecting. As Ali depicts so beautifully, “holiness is everywhere,” and sacrifice can sharpen our attunement to it.
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, by Pema Chödrön
Probably no other book on Earth has given me more comfort over the years than this one. Chödrön is a kind of patron saint to Buddhists in the United States, and for good reason. Her warm explanations of Buddhist principles make clear their application to everyday struggles. This book is her most direct explication of the First Noble Truth—that life is suffering—and it locates the freedom of living in that truth. She instructs readers to cultivate compassion and curiosity, and to stop running from fear. This final invocation, against choosing comfort over distress, is the most challenging kind of abstinence for many of us, myself certainly included. She asks us to feel the needle of fear without slipping away with a fantasy, a snack, a book, or a lover. I once read a definition of compulsion that described it as “an action meant to relieve a mental obsession.” As an addict, much of my life has been governed by such actions. But as Chödrön explains, when we pause before the deed “and don’t act out, don’t repress, don’t blame it on anyone else, and also don’t blame it on ourselves, then we meet with an open-ended question that has no conceptual answer. We also encounter our heart.”
Notes and Methods, by Hilma af Klint
This book contains the first English translation of the writings of af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic. Born in 1862, she was trained in painting at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in Stockholm, where she was among the first generation of women admitted. She painted naturalistic portraits and detailed studies until, in her mid-40s, she dove dramatically into abstraction. A student of Goethe’s color theory and a member of Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophical Society, she eschewed traditional painting methods in order to pursue what she encountered through séances and mediumship: an invisible life force undergirding everything. Years before Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian created their nonrepresentative canvases, af Klint assembled a massive body of abstract work marked by esoteric spiritual codes, diagrams, and symbols. Before she died in 1944, she indicated that she did not want her paintings revealed to the public for at least two decades, claiming that the world was not ready for them—and, true to her prediction, her work found a rapturous audience when it was shown in the 21st century. Notes and Methods includes a glossary of her meanings along with reproductions of her sketches and paintings. It provides a guide to the thoughts behind the great artist’s works. It is also, more implicitly, an ode to the freedom found in relinquishing the need for recognition in one’s lifetime.
The Art of Sleeping Alone, by Sophie Fontanel
This memoir describes the period of time that its author, a glamorous French fashion-magazine editor, spent voluntarily celibate in her late 20s. At the start, she imagines a life turned “soft and fluffy”; she claims, “I was through with being had.” Fontanel goes on to elegantly describe the gratification of aloneness, and offers keen social observations about the mistaken assumptions of others, foremost among them the idea that a woman needs a partner to find happiness. “I don’t know if love makes us blind,” she ponders, “but I do believe that solitude allows us to see inside people’s minds”—that is, it hones a person’s ability to accurately perceive others, and oneself. Set against a classically Parisian backdrop, this tour through Fontanel’s head is pure pleasure, especially her moving reflections on how celibacy led to healing her own relationship with her body and sexual desire: “Could it trust me, this body, after the rough treatment I’d put it through?” She finds that it can.
Drinking: A Love Story, by Caroline Knapp
Knapp’s memoir of sobriety is just one entry in a robust genre, standing among books such as Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey, The Night of the Gun by David Carr, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Lit by Mary Karr, and The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. But Drinking: A Love Story was pivotal for me; I borrowed it from a sober person when I first started trying to stop. Knapp’s depiction of addiction as a doomed love affair struck home. “For a long time,” she writes, “when it’s working, the drink feels like a path to a kind of self-enlightenment, something that turns us into the person we wish to be, or the person we think we really are.” Every book about abstinence is also, inevitably, a book about indulgence—and what lies at its bottom, eventually demanding that we go without. As Knapp puts it, “In some ways the dynamic is this simple: alcohol makes everything better until it makes everything worse.” Her book details the glory and devastation that precedes the liberation of quitting, including the way that our excesses can subtly (or violently) affect our intimate relationships. Knapp’s lushly written story illustrates the insidious way that romanticizing a dependency of any kind distorts its true impact on our lives.
Writings, by Agnes Martin
I had long loved Martin’s famous, minimalist mid-century grid paintings, but for a long time I didn’t know much about their creator. During my period of celibacy, this changed. Something of a mystic, just like af Klint, Martin found meaning and structure in artistic practice and spiritual rigor. Raised by Calvinists, she rejected formal religion but was influenced by many philosophies, particularly Taoism. Martin lived an ascetic and solitary life, and often denounced overly cerebral art. “A lot of people will think that social understanding or something like that is going to lead us to the truth, but it isn’t. It is understanding of yourself,” she said in a mid-1970s interview. Or, as she put it to a class of students at the Skowhegan School in 1987: “The intellect has nothing to do with artwork.” Writings is full of notes, poems, micro-essays, lectures, and aphoristic passages that ring in my memory years after I first read them. Though Martin was diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychotic episodes plagued her, she never described her life as an unhappy one. She chose the path she wanted, one that structured and directed the insurmountable forces intrinsic in her and alchemized them into great art.
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