The function of diversion is simply to anesthetize the individual as individual, and to plunge him in the warm, apathetic stupor of a collectivity which, like himself, wishes to remain amused. The break with the big group is compensated by enrollment in the little group. It is a flight not into solitude but into a protesting minority.
Such a flight may be more or less honest, more or less honorable. Certainly it inspires the anger of those who believe themselves to be the “right thinking majority” and it necessarily comes in for its fair share of mockery on that account. They abandon one illusion which is forced on everyone and substitute for it another, more esoteric illusion, of their own making. They have the satisfaction of making a choice, but not the fulfillment of having chosen reality.
The true solitary is not called to an illusion, to the contemplation of himself as solitary. He is called to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition. The disconcerting task of facing and accepting one’s own absurdity. The anguish of realizing that underneath the apparently logical pattern of a more or less “well organized” and rational life, there lies an abyss of irrationality, confusion, pointlessness, and indeed of apparent chaos. Interior solitude is the actualization of a faith in which a man takes responsibility for his own inner life.
If every society were ideal, then every society would help its members only to a fruitful and productive self-transcendence. But in fact societies tend to lift a man above himself only far enough to make him a useful and submissive instrument in whom the aspirations, lusts and needs of the group can function unhindered by too delicate a personal conscience. Social life tends to form and educate a man, but generally at the price of a simultaneous deformation and perversion. This is because civil society is never ideal, always a mixture of good and evil, and always tending to present the evil in itself as a form of good.
Often the lonely and the empty have found their way into this pure silence only after many false starts. They have taken many wrong roads, even roads that were totally alien to their character and vocation. They have repeatedly contradicted themselves and their own inmost truth. One has to be born into solitude carefully, patiently and after long delay, out of the womb of society. The price of fidelity in such a task is a completely dedicated humility — an emptiness of heart in which self-assertion has no place.
For if he is not empty and undivided in his own inmost soul, the solitary will be nothing more than an individualist. And in that case, his non-conformity is nothing but an act of rebellion: the substitution of idols and illusions of his own choosing for those chosen by society. And this, of course, is the greatest of dangers.
One who has been found by solitude, and invited to enter it, and has entered freely, falls into the desert the way a ripe fruit falls out of a tree. It does not matter what kind of a desert it may be: in the midst of men or far from them. It is the one vast desert of emptiness which belongs to no one and to everyone.
True solitude is not mere separateness. It tends only to unity. The true solitary does not renounce anything that is basic and human about his relationship to other men. He is deeply united to them — all the more deeply because he is no longer entranced by marginal concerns. What he renounces is the superficial imagery and the trite symbolism that pretend to make the relationship more genuine and more fruitful.
One who is called to solitude is called to emptiness and in this emptiness he does not find points upon which to base a contrast between himself and others. On the contrary, he realizes, though perhaps confusedly, that he has entered into a solitude that is really shared by everyone. It is not that he is solitary while everybody else is social: but that everyone is solitary, in a solitude masked by that symbolism which they use to cheat and counteract their solitariness. The solitary is one who is aware of solitude in himself as a basic and inevitable human reality, not just as something which affects him as an isolated individual. Hence his solitude is the foundation of a deep, pure and gentle sympathy with all other men.
Thomas Merton, from Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude
