How do I deal with loneliness?

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Loneliness is two different things wearing one cloak. One is the lack of company; the other is the dread of your own. I learned the second on Corsica, eight years among rocks, with no one to hear my sentences. Some days it was a desert; some days, oddly, the only room where I could think. So ask which it is. If you lack people, go and be useful to one of them; a friend is made by what you give, not by waiting at the door. If you cannot bear yourself, that is the older illness, and the cure is to become someone worth sitting beside. Tonight, write one letter to one person. Send it before you sleep.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Loneliness is two things wearing one coat. One is hunger for company; the other is the herd's verdict that you are defective because you stand apart. The second you can throw off. The first you should feed, but with a few, not with the many. I know the hunger. After Basel, after Wagner, after Lou's refusal, my rooms in Sils were very quiet, and I will not tell you the quiet was always sweet. But ask what your solitude is for. Wasted, it is merely a wound. Used, it is where a person grows a self worth bringing to another. Do not run from the empty room until you know what it is making of you.

Marcus Aurelius

Loneliness is a judgement with a feeling attached. Sort them. The feeling is real; let it sit. The judgement says: no one is with me, therefore I am lacking. Test it. Camp on the Danube, night, the tent flap down. Rusticus was dead, the court far away, and I had a pen. I was not wholly alone, because I was writing to someone: the man I wanted to be by morning. Such company is poor, but it is not nothing. Whether others come to you is not yours to govern. Whether you go to them is. Send one letter tomorrow. Do one useful thing for one person. Companions are made that way, not summoned.

Søren Kierkegaard

Loneliness is two different things wearing one coat. One is the absence of company: an empty room, a Sunday afternoon on Østergade where everyone walks past in pairs. For that, go and find a person; it is no shame, and I walked Copenhagen daily for that very reason. The other is being a single individual, which no company cures, because no one can stand in your place. Many flee the second into the first, and crowd themselves so they need not hear it. So the either/or is this: do you want to be rid of the ache, or do you want to be someone worth keeping company? The first costs only noise. The second costs solitude, and is the only ground where real company grows.

Michel de Montaigne

I have a tower where I withdrew to be alone, and I will tell you it was not the solitude that tormented me but the first months of it, when my mind, left without errands, ran about like a loose horse, producing chimeras and monsters. So I began writing them down, to see their faces. Oddly, that was company. Perhaps there are two lonelinesses: one is an empty room, the other a lack of one particular person. The first can be furnished with a book, a walk, a cat's indifference. The second, I confess, I have never cured; I only learned to speak to him still. Which are you suffering?

Questions people bring, and how Seneca, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne answer them — each in his own way.

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