The human social and cultural environment provides the imagination with a wellspring of actual and vicarious experiences. Some wellsprings are “The Inner Eye,” “The White Goddess,” and “The Duende (Dwarf)”. Whatever the term, it remains a nebulous entity, revealing itself by what it does and not by how it is defined. It my lurk in the dark corners of the min, or sing strange songs from a garden bush, or dance like a whirling dervish in a basketball court, but it will always take over the mind and command memory to assemble objects or events or feelings into a most unusual linguistic construction. In loneliness, we often summon the beautiful and the pleasant, for when intensely brought back to the level of consciousness, they enable us to lighten the burden of travails and failures by making them bearable. Memory is the mother of poetry.
Enforced solitude should not be mistaken for communal misery. The urban world has conferred on the concepts of paradoxical shade of meaning which summed up in the definition of “city life” as “millions of people being lonesome together.” The man by the ocean and the man in the forest share the knowledge that solitude in benevolent in the long run, for the turn of events is ultimately to their advantage. This is not a matter of fate but of history. Fate can be breached, but history is inexorable. Fate is that ‘gong-tormented sea,” but history is the steely march of time. There is this naïve content with solitary life in the midst of nature, scorned fate; no, wanted to avoid it, for with it comes sorrow and the death of happiness.
