Solitude #2

once God has called you to solitude, everything you touch leads you further into solitude.  TM, Sign

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. TM, No Man

True solitude separates one man from the rest in order that he may freely develop the good that is his own, and then fulfill his true destiny by putting himself at the service of everyone else.  TM, No Man

The true solitary does not have to run away from others: they cease to notice him, because he does not share their love for an illusion.  TM, No Man

In order to find our own souls we have to enter into our own solitude and learn to live with ourselves.  This is the beginning of true humanism, because we cannot know man until we find him in ourselves.  TM, Disputed

Solitude is a fortress that protects the heart against all that is not Christ, and its only function is to allow Christ to live in us.  Solitude spiritualizes the whole man, transforms him, body and soul, from a carnal to a spiritual being. TM, Disputed

in reality, all men are solitary.  Only most of them are so averse to being alone, or to feeling alone, that they do everything they can to forget their solitude. TM, “Notes”

How [do we forget solitude]?  Perhaps in large measure by what Pascal called ‘divertissement’ – diversion, systematic distraction.  By those occupations and recreations, so mercifully provided by society, which enable a man to avoid his own company for twenty-four hours a day TM, “Notes”

the function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused.  The bread and circuses which fulfil this function may be blatant and absurd, or they may assume a hypocritical air of intense seriousness. TM, “Notes”

Every man is a solitary, held firmly by the inexorable limitations of his aloneness.  Death makes this very clear, for when a man dies, he dies alone. TM, “Notes”

The presence of many living men around the deathbed of one who is in agony may unite them all in the mystery of death, but it also unites them in a mystery of living solitude.  It paradoxically unites them while reminding them acutely – and beyond words – of their isolation.  Each one will have to die, and die alone.  And, at the same time, (but this is what they do not want to see) each one must also live alone. TM, “Notes”

The solitary of whom I speak is called not to leave society but to transcend it: not to withdraw from the fellowship with other men but to renounce the appearance, the myth of union in diversion in order to attain to union on a higher and more spiritual level – the mystical level of the Body of Christ.  TM, “Notes”

The solitary is one who is called to make one of the most terrible decisions possible to man: the decision to disagree completely with those who imagine that the call to diversion and self-deception is the voice of truth and who can summon the full authority of their own prejudice to prove it. TM, “Notes”