Octavio Paz on Solitude

Perhaps the most famous work of Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz is El Laberinto de la Soledad, The Labrynth of Solitude.  This is how he begins his final chapter.  Though by no means a "Christian" writer, I think he hits upon something with a ring of truth here…

Solitude – the feeling and knowledge that one is alone, alienated from the world and oneself – is not an exclusively Mexican characteristic.  All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone.  And they are.  To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future.  Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition.  Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another.  His nature – if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature – consists in his longing to realize himself in another.  Man is nostalgia and a search for communion.  Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.