1. Two excerpts from Goodreads reviews for Cal Newport’s Deep Work. A user named Jennifer writes: “he rarely mentions how he handles caring for his sons or home life except that he doesn’t work after 5:30 pm which is impressive but still: who cooks dinner and how does his schedule change when one of the kids is sick or does his wife stay home?” A user named Diane writes “He never (as far as I could tell) even acknowledges that he is reliant on his unappreciated and unnamed wife to give him his precious time, or that his love of the ‘monastic’ approach to focus can only be achieved with the actual work of (presumably female) subordinates.”
  2. In her 2013 study of female solitude, Karin Arndt writes: “I think this image of one person holding the other in her or his solitude is often overlooked, especially when thinking about the lives of male artists, spiritual practitioners, and writers. For example, Thoreau was not strictly self-reliant in his solitude at Walden Pond; Emerson provided the land and therefore the physical holding space for his solitude as well as a certain amount of encouragement and blessing. Thoreau’s solitude was essentially permitted, held, and enabled by his mentor. Likewise, his Trappist monastery, the Abbey of Gethsemani, and the work of the monks who lived there made Thomas Merton’s well-known eremitic lifestyle possible. The solitude of individuals usually involves both the psychological and material support of others. The capacity to be alone, or to have a fruitful experience of solitude, is not only a psychological development that happens or fails to happen during childhood; as a capacity, it requires the care and upkeep of other people and institutions throughout the course of one’s life” - A room of one’s own, revisited: An existential-hermeneutic study of female solitude, PhD thesis, Duquesne University.