It is discovery, not diversion that I seek

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:01:45 +0000

Perhaps I am not the anti-Stowe after all since I caught him quoting Paul Theroux thusly:

Theroux is also dead on about the cold, leaden comfort of solitude and how it's dead weight can act as a pendulum, turning our gears as writers, or artists:

[...] it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest.

Being with people so much, up close, intimately: it's like playing in the waves at the beach. It's exhilarating, but quickly tires you, and then you are on the beach, panting with purplish lips, waiting for the stillness and the distant sun to warm your bones again.

I'd always thought of myself as the anti-Stowe since, despite the convergence of our interests, he can be so much more extrovert than I am. To a level I find it painful to contemplate. But this is another side of him in which he he neatly sums up one of the key difficulties of my life:

That no matter how much I enjoy the company of others I find it a drain on some part of my psyche that I do not pretend to understand. And that my solitude is not an enclosure, so much as a space in which I can both recover and explore.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on solitude

It is discovery, not diversion that I seek