Hands and Feet

No matter how much you move your hands and feet, it is useless. So loneliness does not lie in what corner you find. True loneliness means that even in the middle of a crowd, you are still a piece of driftwood in a rushing current, a servant in raging rapids; you are a mendicant monk in the desert. Has anyone ever seen a mendicant monk in the desert? Amid the vast sea of sand, a lone traveler walks on. So loneliness has nothing to do with any particular corner. And while loneliness may often manifest as silence, there is no inevitable connection between loneliness and silence. Let me define a true loner: a loner is a wanderer of thought, a wanderer of the spirit. Do not think that merely because—I often see some boys at school dressed in baggy clothes, lighting a cigarette, then using clouds of smoke to create an atmosphere of loneliness for themselves—that this is loneliness. I want to tell everyone that whether it is smoking or drinking, these are only means of numbing oneself or acting cool, used to achieve a false appearance of loneliness. Loneliness belongs to wanderers of spirit and thought. A person without thought or spirit cannot be lonely; at most, he is merely lonesome. He is using cigarette ash to kindle the cold desolation of his loneliness. So do not assume that loneliness follows any particular form. When the pursuit of the essence of loneliness—its nature as a matter of the soul—turns into a pursuit of its outward forms and appearances, you have already become very shallow. You have already become unbearably vulgar. At the same time, you must remember that loneliness is absolutely not something we deliberately cultivate in ourselves so that we may possess thought or a certain temperament—a melancholy