dailymeh:

Roger Ebert:

When I spent a year in Cape Town, half a world away from everyone and everything I knew, I wasn’t lonely for a moment. I was enveloped in the pleasure of exile. I’ve always enjoyed fiction about exile; give me a novel that starts with someone alone in a room in a strange city, and I perk up. I identify with the meaning given to “nostalgia” by Tarkovsky, which in one Russian sense means a longing for one’s home so sweet and sharp one might almost leave home in order to feel it.

I’ve never understood this bittersweet narcissism within myself. I love to wander lonely streets in unknown cities. To find a cafe and order a coffee and think to myself — here I am, known to no one, drinking my coffee and reading my paper. To sit somewhere just barely out of the rain, and declare that my fortress. I think of myself in the third person: Who is he? What is his mystery? I have explained before how I’m attracted to anonymous formica restaurants where I can read my book and look forward to rice pudding for desert. To leave that warm place and enter the dark city is a strange pleasure. Nostalgia perhaps.

The pleasures of solitude are underrated. The paradoxical thing is that those most capable of feeling lonely may also be those who are most capable of enjoying being alone. I know I enjoy solitude, in the right measure and for the right reasons, immensely. I think I’d sooner go mad from one week of constant socializing, without downtime, than I’d do from a week without contact with other people. But extend the length to a month, and just the opposite would happen. It’s a balance.

(Source: dailymeh, via purisubzi)

#Epic