I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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There are times when
… I can find myself in a book, too, for two or three hours. But afterward I have such an urge to go out and reach for other people. Very often they’re not around. There’s also a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one’s own life is experiencing sensations that no one…
Solitude is fine…
…but you need someone to tell that solitude is fine. ― Honoré de Balzac
I had already found that it was not good to be alone
…, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else. ― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World
Find meaning
Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover…
You once said that
… you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always…
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods
… There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more” ― George Gordon Byron