Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • The food barely filled me. I could have eaten forever, and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

    Jami Attenburg, Protective Measures [from the book Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone]

  • I had no specific place to go, so I just kept walking, and looking. It was while walking the streets of that same city that the philosopher Walter Benjamin arrived at the conclusion: ‘Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.’ Perhaps it isn’t that urban spaces, when empty, create a feeling of palpable absence, but rather, when they are empty, we can confront the feelings of abandonment and loneliness that thrum below the surfaces.

    Struth’s unpeopled photos evoke the loneliness of urban life

  • In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can “see the folks,” and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day’s solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and “the blues”; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.

    Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau

  • Was I capable of being happy in solitude? I didn’t think so. Was I capable of being happy in general? That’s the kind of question, I think, that is best not asked.

    Serotonin: A Novel by Michel Houellebecq

  • First Reformed (2017)

  • “The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; as it seemed good unto the Lord even so has it come to pass, blessed be the name of the Lord forever.” Let this speech be our utterance also over each event which befalls us, whether it be loss of property, or infirmity of body, or insult, or false accusation, or any other form of evil that happens to mankind, let us say these words:

    “The Lord gave, the Lord hath taken away; as it seemed good to the Lord so has it come to pass; blessed be the name of the Lord forever.”

    If we practice this spiritual wisdom, we shall never experience any evil, even if we undergo countless sufferings, but the gain will be greater than the loss, the good will exceed the evil.

    By these words you will cause God to be merciful to you, and will defend yourself against the tyranny of Satan. For as soon as your tongue has uttered these words, immediately the devil flees from you. And when he has hastened away, the cloud of dejection also is dispelled and the thoughts which afflict us take to flight, hurrying off in company with him. And in addition to all this you will win all manner of blessings both here and in Heaven. And you have a convincing example in the case of Job and of the apostle, who having for God’s sake despised the troubles of this world, obtained the everlasting blessings. Let us then be trustful and in all things which befall us let us rejoice and give thanks to the merciful God, that we may pass through this present life with serenity and obtain the blessings to come, by the grace and lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ to Whom be glory, honor and might always, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

    Saint John Chrysostom
    On the Two Paralytics in the Gospels
    Homilies on Profitable Subjects

  • Our first and foremost task is faithfully to care for the inward fire so that when it is really needed it can offer warmth and light to lost travelers. Nobody expressed this with more conviction than the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh:

    “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passersby only see a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney, and go along their way.  Look here, now what must be done?  Must one tend the inner fire, have salt in oneself, wait patiently yet with how much impatience the hour when somebody will come and sit down–maybe to stay? Let him who believes in God wait for the hour that will come sooner or later.”

    Vincent van Gogh speaks here with the mind and heart of the Desert Fathers. He knew about the temptation to open all the doors so that passersby could see the fire and not just the smoke coming through the chimney. But he also realized that if this happened, this fire would die and nobody would find warmth and new strength. His own life is a powerful example of faithfulness to the inner fire. During his life nobody came to sit down at his fire, but today thousands have found comfort and consolation in his drawings, paintings, and letters.

    —Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: The Spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers

  • “A small hair disturbs the eye, and a small care ruins solitude; because solitude is the banishment of thoughts and ideas, and the rejection of even laudable cares.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent