Enjoying Loneliness

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.