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    Enjoying Loneliness
    Enjoying Loneliness
    Enjoying Loneliness
    Ebook74 pages1 hour

    Enjoying Loneliness

    By Pasquale Romeo

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    About this ebook

    This is an essay, translated by Paola Canale, which only apparently depicts solitude as a “soul disease”, expressing instead a more intimate need, a spiritual state nowadays man has trouble to find in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
    Pasquale Romeo is attracted by a sublime “Carpe diem” fascination and thinks loneliness is an “elevated moment of truth which doesn’t warm, but illuminates”.
    Solitude, reminding Buddhist experience, in Pasquale Romeo’s opinion, is meditation and as such, it’s relative to different branches of knowledge: philosophy, literature, anthropology and psychiatry; he defines it as “a window on the world” in the field of human and social sciences. The author uses an “impressionistic” and “symbolic” writing style, taking particular inspiration from artworks of renowned painters such as Magritte, Gericault, Bosch or Escher in order to describe solitude as a form of alienation, and, at times, of insanity. In doing so, two keys to interpretation are given to us: the first one is a professional psychiatric point of view, a second one takes an absolutely poetic form. He looks at himself, in the artistic imaginary, within the painting to which he refers and in it he loses himself and invites us, although not explicitly, to lose ourselves in the deep realms of the psyche as a created form and dissolved at the same time in the work of art.
    Romeo well defines these “golden moments” of solitude as a useful and fruitful condition, which let us fix the “co-ordinates” of our existence, and that can be experienced in total aloofness and detachment, but that everyone can experience staying among people.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPasquale Romeo
    Release dateNov 30, 2013
    ISBN9781310480249
    Enjoying Loneliness
    Author

    Pasquale Romeo

    Professor of Psychiatry at the University for Foreigners “Dante Alighieri”, Reggio Calabria, Italy I’m a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, author of many articles, Editorial Director of Research’s Magazine, responsible for many columns and a tv anchor. Winner in Reggio Calabria (Italy) of “Anassilaos- Youngs” Prize in 2001 in reason of my curriculum vitae et studiorum and of Pericle Prize in 2006 in Bovalino, Reggio Calabria (Italy) relating to social and cultural communication. National Responsible for Psychiatry in Forensic Science Research Group of University of Siena, Italy.

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      Book preview

      Enjoying Loneliness - Pasquale Romeo

      ENJOYING LONELINESS Pasquale Romeo

      Published by Pasquale Romeo

      Copyright 2013 Pasquale Romeo

      Smashwords Edition

      (Translated by dr.Paola Canale)

      FOREWORD

      This is an essay which only apparently depicts solitude as a soul disease, whilst it expresses more intimately a need, a spiritual state nowadays man has trouble to find in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

      The author defines this concept with a quasi-poetic slant, right from the first pages, when he quotes an image discussed by Milan Kundera who writes about his preference to sleep in trains, because of its old and reassuring din, rather than at home, because he can hear the noise of the new combustion motors. In quoting this, Pasquale Romeo turns upside down this concept, expressing the longing today we feel for what he defines as a little silence: an absolutely exceptional fact in the chaotic society we live in.

      Therefore solitude, reminding Buddhist experience in Pasquale Romeo’s opinion, is meditation and as such, it’s relative to different branches of knowledge: philosophy, literature, anthropology and psychiatry; he defines it as a window on the world in the field of human and social sciences. The author uses an impressionistic and obviously symbolic style of writing, taking particular inspiration from artworks of renowned painters such as Magritte, Gericault, Bosch or Escher in order to describe solitude as a form of alienation, and, at times, of insanity. In doing so, two keys to interpretation are given to us: the first one is a professional psychiatric point of view, a second one takes an absolutely poetic form.

      He looks at himself, in the artistic imaginary, within the painting to which he refers and in it he loses himself and invites us, although not explicitly, to lose ourselves in the deep realms of the psyche as a created form and dissolved at the same time in the work of art. In other words, he tries to penetrate not the semantic content of the work of art, but the fractals created by the brushwork, in the act of painting, therefore not in the completed work, but in the creative process is an act, intended as meditation and introspection, as a moment of solitude lived, not suffered. In this way, solitude is welcomed and at the same time shared: the painting becomes a mirror from which it is difficult to take one’ eyes off, a mirror of one’s own soul which looks through the so faint line that lies between the historical and anthropological dimension, on one side, and an alien one, on the other, leading, sometimes, to the point of insanity. The approach to the topic of loneliness, today, is such as to compel us to a kind of rejection of this mental state. In spite of this, Romeo well defines everyone’s need to get few moments of solitude (that he calls golden moments) , as a useful and fruitful condition, which let us fix the co-ordinates of our existence, and that can be experienced in total aloofness and detachment, but that everyone can experience staying among people. In the second hypothesis you can face with lack of understanding by people who don’t appreciate such absent behaviour. In any case, although he doesn’t provide us a definition of solitude as a creative choice, he continuously evokes it, leading us to this interpretation, almost suggesting the pursuit of this condition, as he described in the first part of the essay, later brought back through the concept of floating attention, or in other words, drawing ideas from the works of Pirandello, a mechanical phantasmagory and yet from David Walcott visionary rage, all conditions which, however are, each in its own way, creative and therefore destabilizing, subversive of an establishment state simply static and inactive.

      Moreover, according to Romeo, there is another and more widespread solitude, different from the creative, artistic perspective, and it’s the solitude nowadays experienced by ordinary people, no matter what age they are, whether they are adolescents or adults. In this perspective, solitude is experienced as a confinement, therefore perceived as a failure because the sense of oneself is lost: autonomous, but all the while part of a society composed of nothing more than a multitude of other selves who follow the same stereotype and respond to standardizing needs and urges, repeated to the point of obsession’s interiorization, almost reaching paranoia. Pasquale Romeo is attracted by a sublime Carpe diem fascination and thinks loneliness is an elevated moment of truth which doesn’t warm, but illuminates. This perspective, borrowed from Esoteric philosophy – Buddhism in particular – imply, however, in my opinion, a contradiction with the holistic vision of consciousness underlined by the author in his introduction. In such a meaning, we know that solitude can never be dissociated with the presence of one’s self, without becoming a pathology, and this is also what the author says in the central part of the essay; it doesn’t exist such a state of abstraction from reality that allows you to leave your body. Consequently, solitude felt by

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