Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash
After 2,440 days in exile and isolation - of which the last 520 days have effectively been spent in solitary confinement (only a demented old woman and a cat for company) - I can vouch for the fact that:
"The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both vaguer and more penetrating than those of people in society; his thoughts are heavier, more odd, and touched always with melancholy. Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit."
- Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. Kenneth Burke, (The Dial, 1924).
