Tag Archives: solitude

Alejandra Pizarnik

Estuve pensando que nadie me piensa. Que estoy absolutamente sola. Que nadie, nadie siente mi rostro dentro de sí ni mi nombre correr por su sangre. Nadie actúa invocándome, nadie construye su vida incluyéndome. He pensado tanto en estas cosas. He pensado que puedo morir en cualquier instante y nadie amenazará a la muerte, nadie la injuriará por haberme arrastrado, nadie velará por mi nombre. He pensado en mi soledad absoluta, en mi destierro de toda conciencia que no sea la mía. He pensado que estoy sola y que me sustento sólo en mí para sobrellevar mi vida y mi muerte. Pensar que ningún ser me necesita, que ninguno me requiere para completar su vida.

Alejandra Pizarnik, Diarios, Barcelona, 2003, February 16th, 1956

Thomas De Quincey

No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude.

Thomas De Quincey, ‘Suspiria de profundis: Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 57, no. 353 (March, 1845), p. 270

Albert Einstein

Ich bin zwar im täglichen Leben ein typischer Einspänner, aber das Bewusstsein, der unsichtbaren Gemeinschaft derjenigen anzugehören, die nach Wahrheit, Schönheit und Gerechtigkeit streben, hat das Gefühl der Vereinsamung nicht aufkommen lassen.

Albert Einstein, ‘Mein Glaubensbekenntnis’, 1932

Henry David Thoreau

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston, 1854

Edith Bone

[I]n my specially isolated cell I was, to a very considerable extent, undisturbed, especially in the first five months after the sentence when I was in the dark and therefore necessarily inactive physically. In the dark there is little one can do except thjink, and the absence of anything to divert one’s thoughts gives them an intensity seldom experienced in normal conditions.

Edith Bone, Seven Years Solitary, London, 1957, p. 103