“The solitary easily plunges to a cavern of darkness and of phantoms more horrible and more absurd than the most inane set of conventional social images. The suffering he must then face is neither salutary nor noble. It is catastrophic.”

Thomas Merton. “Notes for a ‘Philosophy of Solitude’.” (1960) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O’Connell. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013), p. 72.