Solitude is obviously dangerous for people with active brains. We need men around us who have ideas and like talking. Leave us alone for any length of time, and we start filling the void with supernatural creatures.
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn__ have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn__ have to be a walk during which you__l have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don__ find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn__ make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
Notebooks 1951-1959
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Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn__ have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn__ have to be a walk during which you__l have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don__ find meaning but 'steal' some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn__ make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
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Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear, on the contrary, that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning. Living an experience, a particular fate, is accepting it fully. Now, no one will live this fate, knowing it to be absurd, unless he does everything to keep before him that absurd brought to light by consciousness.
You__e got to stop thinking of consciousness as your own. You__e only thinking for yourself when you are by yourself. As soon as you are in the presence of others, your consciousness is linked at some level to those others.
Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
No child should ever be too sad to play.
Listen, Harriet. I do unterstand. I know you don't want either to give or to take ... You don't want ever again to have to depend for happiness on another person.""That's true. That's the truest thing you ever said.""All right. I can respect that. Only you've got to play the game. Don't force an emotional situation and then blame me for it.""But I don't want any situation. I want to be left in peace.