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#MastersofSocialIsolation #12. In 1941 #ThomasMerton entered the strict cloister of the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani. In the Trappists his heart was captured by the image of men “on this miserably noisy, cruel earth, who tasted the marvelous joy of silence and solitude." 
Henceforth he would serve the world by his prayers. Yet even as he longed for even greater solitude, his attitude toward the world was changing. On an errand in Louisville he had a mystical epiphany in which he saw his deep connection with the mass of human beings.
“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation..."
#MastersofSocialIsolation #10. In a time when Jewish children in Europe were hunted like vermin, Anne Frank did not choose her isolation. With her own and another family she was confined for 2 years in a “secret annex” in Amsterdam, never going out, keeping still all day.
She kept a diary, not simply as a distraction but as a duty, a responsibility to render her experience and her feelings in the most accurate terms. Along with the everyday experiences of a young girl confined indoors she recorded very unchildlike reflections on her perilous life.
“I see the 8 of us with our ‘Secret Annex’ as if we were a little piece of blue heaven, surrounded by heavy black rain clouds. The ... spot where we stand is still safe, but the clouds gather more closely about us and the circle which separates us from the approaching danger...
#MastersofSocialIsolation #3 Henry David Thoreau. In his classic “Walden” he described the 2 years he spent in a small cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, near Concord MA. There he sought to escape the deadness of a world in which “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
He was 25 at the time. As he wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
He provides a meticulous account of the details of his life and his attention both to the world of nature and his own inner world. He was never lonely in the company of Nature. Sitting in the rain, “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”
