Category: LONELINESS & SOLITUDE

  • “Although one can be supported, comforted, and helped throughout one’s life, the step of death itself, the moment of death, well that has to be taken all alone.”

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah

  • The uneasiness of silence does not come from the silence itself but about what it reveals. A retreatant comes to a charterhouse in order to encounter God, and he begins by encountering an unexpected person: himself. The surprise is not particularly pleasant.

    …

    When a candidate comes to make a retreat with us, many memories rise again to the surface. They have been in him for a long time, covered up by the noises of life. When the commotion stops, he can no longer escape, and he understands that the silence and solitude of the cell that he perceived as a place of rest are also a place of trial where he will have to face the most difficult combat: the battle with himself.

    The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise
    Cardinal Robert Sarah, Nicolas Diat

  • “Try to unlearn officiousness and curiosity; for they can spoil solitude as nothing else can.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else.”

    —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  • “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”

    —Rainer Maria Rilke

  • Dear Reader,

    We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well. But they don’t. Even those who love us get us wrong. They tell us who we are but miss things out. They claim to know what we need, but forget to ask us properly first. They can’t understand what we feel — and sometimes, we’re unable to tell them, because we don’t really understand it ourselves. That’s where books come in. They explain us to ourselves and to others, and make us feel less strange, less isolated and less alone. We might have lots of good friends, but even with the best friends in the world, there are things that no one quite gets. That’s the moment to turn to books. They are friends waiting for us any time we want them, and they will always speak honestly to us about what really matters. They are the perfect cure for loneliness. They can be our very closest friends.

    Yours,

    Alain

    ALAIN DE BOTTON’S LOVELY LETTER TO CHILDREN ABOUT WHY WE READ

  • As a child I was always borrowing other people’s families, being invited for a week or a month in the summer to share a family life.

    Journal of a Solitude
    May Sarton

  • And therefore God, the Creator of all, caring above everything for the restoration of His handiwork, and knowing that the root and cause of offenses lie not in others but in our own selves, has bade us not to separate ourselves from consort with the brethren, nor to avoid those whom we think that we have injured or that they have injured us, but rather to soothe their feelings, knowing that a perfect heart is acquired, not by drawing apart from men, but by the virtue of patience. This virtue, when it is firmly held, will make us to hold to the love of peace even with them that hate peace, and when we possess it not, our lack thereof makes us constantly at enmity with those who may be perfect and higher in virtue than we. For it needs must be that, in the course of human intercourse, occasions of perturbation will arise which will make us hurry to quit the company of those to whom we are bound, and for this reason, when we leave one set of companions for another, we are not ridding ourselves of causes of sadness, but only changing them.

    +St. John Cassian, Selected Writings of St. John Cassian the Roman

  • Helplessness and isolation are the core experiences of psychological trauma. Empowerment and reconnection are the core experiences of recovery.

    —Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery

  • A wandering mind is made stable by reading, vigil and prayer. Flaming lust is extinguished by hunger, labor, and solitude. Stirrings of anger are calmed by psalmody, magnanimity, and mercifulness. All this has its effect when used at its proper time and in due measure. Everything untimely or without proper measure is short-lived; and short-lived things are more harmful than useful.

    —Abba Evagrius the Monk