In solitude your thoughts crowd; you've been avoiding them for so long being among people that they heaped up in a stock of unacknowledged sentiments. Being alone is not meant to be effortless. You are casting out demons and banishing them. You are turning your back on the crowd, as it were, and leaning into yourself. The greatest, most sincere form of self-mastery must come from succeeding in turning loneliness into a friendship with yourself. I can only speak from experience when I say that being solitary is almost a prerequisite for creation and beauty – in its absence, you are too favoured and accepted to produce anything beautiful. I don’t want to resemble the crowd, the common man, because I revere neither his principle nor his way of life. For that reason, I prefer not fall in the mouth of cowardly weeds. Only now and then they run out of things to say, and always have many things to condemn while they gradually flee in their comfortable chambers.
Do you really think you are missing anything? Do you really believe that such people can give you what you so intensely hope for? It doesn’t take much to outclass him who doesn’t stand for anything, who doesn’t create anything. Him who gives himself so freely to being ordinary and inferior that his whole existence revolves around being sane and normal. Yet in his utmost normality he clears out all sense and sanity? Isn’t he also stripped of passion and lacks inventiveness? And when life weighs a burden on him he retreats into his boyhood as if he were naive and unsuitable for suffering… I can’t worship a man whose total selfhood and recreation is either malicious gossip or fault-finding commentary, while he quietly cowers at his own ample insufficiency. His whole life is one enormous contraction, for he is unable to expand or increase his consciousness, become civilised or educated. He doesn’t dare fix his gaze; he purged all mirrors, and did away with looking at himself. He now spends his time improving his arrogance and becoming smaller, for he has lost all hope in himself and wasted the luxuries that lie at his feet.