Do not disgrace your life in the
Crowding Contact with the world,
In the many movements and all the talk—
Dragging it around often and exposing it to
The daily folly of relationships & associations.²
Don’t surrender your Loneliness so quickly—
Let it cut Deeper, let it Ferment & Season you
As few human—or even divine—ingredients can …³
Cultivate Ownlife: Eccentric Individualism⁴
Living Together supposes and guards as its very condition
The possibility of this secret, singular, Inviolable Separation …⁵
Before I can live with others—
I’ve got to Live with Myself.⁶
In a Loneness, in a Loneness—
And the nobler for that Oneness:⁷
The whole theory of the Universe is directed
Unerringly to a single Individual—namely to You!⁸
Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others,
The presence of Self Sufficient to itself.⁹
Faith in Loneliness is faith in Self.¹⁰
¹ Stanley Plumly, Wight
² C.P. Cavafy tr. Rae Dalven, As Much as You Can
³ Shams al-Din Hafiz Shirazi tr. Daniel Ladinsky, Absolutely Clear
⁴ George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
⁵ Jacques Derrida tr. original, Avowing the Impossible
⁶ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
⁷ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Lay of the Early Rose
⁸ Walt Whitman, By Blue Ontario’s Shore
⁹ Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
¹⁰ Jennifer Chang, Again a Solstice