Paul Bowles does a good job of describing the
difference between loneliness and solitude. I find it pretty inspiring.
"Immediately when you arrive in Sahara, for the first
or the tenth time, you notice the stillness. An incredible, absolute silence
prevails outside the towns; and within, even in busy places like the markets,
there is a hushed quality in the air, as if the quiet were a conscious force
which, resenting the intrusion of sound, minimizes and disperses sound
straightaway. Then there is the sky, compared to which all other skies seem
fainthearted efforts. Solid and luminous, it is always the focal point of the
landscape. At sunset, the precise, curved shadow of the earth rises into it
swiftly from the horizon, cutting into light section and dark section. When all
daylight is gone, and the space is thick with stars, it is still of an intense
and burning blue, darkest directly overhead and paling toward the earth, so
that the night never really goes dark.
You leave the gate of the fort or town behind, pass
the camels lying outside, go up into the dunes, or out onto the hard, stony
plain and stand awhile alone. Presently, you will either shiver and hurry back
inside the walls, or you will go on standing there and let something very
peculiar happen to you, something that everyone who lives there has undergone and
which the French call 'le bapteme de solitude.' It is a unique sensation, and
it has nothing to do with loneliness, for loneliness presupposes memory. Here
in this wholly mineral landscape lighted by stars like flares, even memory
disappears...A strange, and by no means pleasant, process of reintergration
begins inside you, and you have the choice of fighting against it, and
insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its
course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same
as when he came.
Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point
is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the
baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of
the vast luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for
him, no other surroundings can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of
existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatever
the cost in time or money, for the absolute has no price."
Não há solidão no absoluto porque o todo é tudo.
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