“The greatest thing in the world,” Montaigne writes, “is to know how to belong to oneself.” And for taking possession of oneself, solitude is indispensable. Not everyone must retreat to a tower as Montaigne did, but to sustain solitude in communal form monks adopt a discipline of silence, and the poet Rilke cherished his marriage as a solitude of two. The important thing is that one find a refuge from the busy-ness of worldly affairs. Joseph Epstein recounts his own discovery of solitude’s pleasures and virtues, exploring also how it relates to writing, death and loneliness.