"It is well to be alone. It fertilizes the creative impulse"
About this Quote
Nordau’s line is a small provocation dressed up as self-help: solitude isn’t just a mood, it’s a deliberate stimulus, a kind of compost for the mind. The verb choice does the real work. “Fertilizes” is tactile, faintly earthy, even a bit impolite for polite society. Creativity, in this framing, isn’t divine inspiration or bourgeois refinement; it’s something grown, cultivated, and frankly dependent on conditions most people try to sterilize away with company, chatter, and routine.
As a fin-de-siecle critic obsessed with cultural health, Nordau often talked like a diagnostician. Here he flips the usual social prescription. Instead of treating aloneness as a symptom to be cured (melancholy, eccentricity, antisocial drift), he treats it as a nutrient. The subtext is slightly combative: if the crowd is where taste hardens into convention, then stepping away from it is not escapism but resistance. Creativity needs insulation from the market’s noise and the salon’s consensus.
There’s also an implicit ethic of discipline. “It is well” reads like advice to someone tempted to fear solitude. Nordau isn’t romanticizing loneliness; he’s legitimizing the chosen kind, the purposeful withdrawal that gives the self room to rearrange its inputs into something new. In a culture already professionalizing art and turning personality into performance, the line stakes out privacy as creative infrastructure, not a luxury.
As a fin-de-siecle critic obsessed with cultural health, Nordau often talked like a diagnostician. Here he flips the usual social prescription. Instead of treating aloneness as a symptom to be cured (melancholy, eccentricity, antisocial drift), he treats it as a nutrient. The subtext is slightly combative: if the crowd is where taste hardens into convention, then stepping away from it is not escapism but resistance. Creativity needs insulation from the market’s noise and the salon’s consensus.
There’s also an implicit ethic of discipline. “It is well” reads like advice to someone tempted to fear solitude. Nordau isn’t romanticizing loneliness; he’s legitimizing the chosen kind, the purposeful withdrawal that gives the self room to rearrange its inputs into something new. In a culture already professionalizing art and turning personality into performance, the line stakes out privacy as creative infrastructure, not a luxury.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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