Solitude yields the original, the boldly and shockingly beautiful, the poem

[piquantplay]

"The observations and chance encounters of the solitary and silent are more blurred, yet at the same time more probing than those of social beings. Their thoughts are deeper and weirder, and never without a tinge of sorrow. Images and perceptions that might otherwise be easily dispensed with by a glance, a laugh or an exchange of opinion excessively occupy the lone individual, gaining depth in silence, taking on meaning, becoming personal experience, adventure and emotion. Solitude yields the original, the boldly and shockingly beautiful, the poem. Yet solitude also yields the perverse and disproportionate, the ridiculous and the beyond-the-pale."

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"Nothing is more bizarre and uncomfortable than the relationship between people acquainted only by sight - people who come face to face on a daily, even hourly basis yet feel compelled by etiquette or foolish obstinacy to forgo all words of greeting, each maintaining a pretense of blithe unawareness of the other's existence. Unease and overworked curiosity hang in the air between them, the neurotic expression of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed need for recognition and interaction, along with a kind of tense respect. People, after all, only love and respect other people so long as they remain unable to judge them. Longing is a child of ignorance."

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice