The values of solitude - one of its values - is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression.  A few moments of desultory conversation…may calm an inner storm.  But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it.  So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.  The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.

Instant success is the order of the day; “I want it now!”  I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines.  Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life…so the few things that we still do…anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.