“However, the truest solitude is not something outside you, not an absence of men or of sound around you; it is an abyss opening up in the center of your own soul.”
— Thomas Merton
In solitude, we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality, which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor of shame.
It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love.
The world our words have attempted to classify, to control, and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.