All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
— Blaise Pascal
I.
Go to any bookstore and you’ll find shelves of books written about living in a relationship — how to find a relationship, how to hold one together once it’s found, how to survive its falling apart, how to find one again. Churches offer classes, preachers preach, teachers teach, therapists counsel about how to get and stay coupled.
Then try looking for lessons in solitude. You will search for a long while, even though more and more of us are…
