Solitude is hard at first: it’s like being sentenced. There are times when you find it unbearable. And perhaps that severe sentence might seem lighter if you could, after all, share it with someone, it doesn’t matter who: with rough companions, anonymous women. There are such times, times of weakness. But they pass, because slowly the loneliness enfolds you, takes personal possession of you, like a mysterious force of life—like time, time in which everything happens. Suddenly you understand that everything that has happened has happened according to its own timetable. First came curiosity, then desire, then work, and finally, here comes loneliness. There’s nothing you want now: you have no hope of consolation in a new woman, no hope of a friend whose wise counsel might heal your soul. You find all human talk vanity, even the wisest. There is so much selfishness in every human feeling. It’s all empty promises, refined forms of blackmail: all helpless, hopeless attachment! Once you know this, you no longer hope for anything from people; you don’t expect women to be of help, you recognize the price and terrifying consequences of money, power, and success, and you no longer want anything of life but to huddle up in some mean corner, without companionship, assistance, and comfort, and listen to the silence that slowly begins to lap at your soul as it does at the shores of time … Then, and only then, you have the right to leave: because leaving is something you do have a perfect right to.