THE SOLITUDE OF A POET - THE SOLITUDE OF A HUMAN
- Nguyen Hoang Duc
- Aug 1
- 5 min read
Post on 31/07/2025
Building yourself up is the most difficult challenge? Saint Exupery once asserted that “Only humans can create loneliness.”
Loneliness! Is this word bitter enough to make your heart tingle? Does building your own ego require you to be willing to accept loneliness? Yes! Loneliness is undoubtedly the harshest challenge in everyone’s destiny.
Here is a heartfelt confession from a priest who contacts thousands of believers everyday on the occasion of priest-believer day: The greatest sacrifice in the life of priests who devote all their life to religion like me is loneliness. Our whole life is nothing but bitter, miserable and sorrowful loneliness. And it becomes a life-long challenge, festering in every cell and blood vessel in a body, in every single second. Am I homeless? No, I am under the arch of the immense church of God. Am I short of rice? No, the whole parish reared me with their ample supplies. Do I have nothing to wear? No, I am always dressed in the most beautiful church robes. The only thing that I lack - the inexplicable void inside my lonely heart - is the warmth from another heart! It is the eternal bitterness of my entire life. And it is also the love that I devote to God - a love that is full of challenges and hardships.
A beautiful virgin closed her soul and built a fortress of solitude so that all the men chasing her would never get her. Why did she do so? She wanted to have her own world in a meaningful afternoon that was started by a vow of love with a brave young man. And then he went away and never returned. She was still waiting for him, her heart, her soul and her body filled with his silhouette and his warmth. The tragedy here was that his silhouette lingered in her mind but he was not there. And there were still a lot of other men waiting for her but he was not one of them. Her fortress was a fortress of bitter loneliness and agony.
Is an animal trapped or lost lonely? No, it is just solitary but not lonely because as soon as it catches sight of its herd, it can easily and gleefully join in. On the contrary, human loneliness is different, it is cold and lonely even when you are in the crowd. There is a true story: there was a Zen Master who left his village in search of a solitary refuge on the snow-covered Himalayas to meditate. After more than 40 years of walking along the Himalayas, he returned to his village helplessly. The villagers asked him:
- You couldn’t find a quiet place to meditate, could you?
He replied:
- No! There were plenty of serene places. It was just that my soul was no longer quiet enough for meditation.
The master just admitted his failure. He was defeated by his loneliness, his boisterous heart could not oblige his eagerly wandering footsteps to stop.
Loneliness is the cruel suffering of a person because he is not only lonely but also aware of his loneliness. However, it is also thanks to their consciousness that people are the only one who dare to face loneliness in order to build themselves up to the fullest. Just imagine, was a pimp who was imprisoned for ten years for his guilt lonely? As soon as he was released from the prison, he fell into the arms of his girls who still admired him as their big brother. No! He could never endure loneliness even for just one hour. His ten years of loneliness was just a forced situation. He never kept that situation in his mind.
Loneliness! It is not a cry for a lost self, loneliness is a condition which prepares you for a human integration in which you are the one with a lot of responsibility and duty. Loneliness is a separate condition so that you can reflect on yourself as well as shape your own awareness. Schelling once said “Humans sleep in the tree trunks, dreaming in the wild but they become aware of themselves as humans. Saint Augustine said that “Man can lose himself in his eternal desire to seek the light of the truth that created it."
That is just human in general, what about writers? Because you are a writer, it is more necessary for you to build your own unique and independent ego and more importantly, you have to create your ego. If you cannot do this, how can your name be printed on your works? And where does creativity come from when life is always the same and will forever be the same. From love? Adam and Eve fell in love with each other since immemorial, didn’t they? From pain? Human tears had shed from generation to generation, didn’t they? From war? The pungent smell of gunpowder and the stink of rotting corpses still haunted the bloody history, didn’t they? From peace? The uneasy breaths of boisterous hearts still trembled in the flow of time, didn’t they? From ambitions? Incidents? Money? Poverty? Injustice? All of them are old. They are as old as human history. Then what did you create? Are you going to create your new outlook amidst all the troubles of this all too familiar world? There is no other way, the first thing you have to create is your own ego. Arthur Rimbaud once said “The study of a man who aspires to be a poet is the study of himself; he has to search for his soul, he scrutinizes and analyses it. As soon as he has understood it, he has to train it, which may seem simple: In any brain, natural development just simply becomes self-sufficient.” (The Creative Path - page 109).
In any brain, natural development just simply becomes self-sufficient. You can never hope that one day, you will become an illustrious writer before you train yourself to be an erudite and perfect person and become a self full of courage that can withstand any difficulty in life. So is your ego strong when you have to rely on other mighty egos? Do your writing base on the brains and the opinions of other people? Do you seek creative inspiration amidst the rumbling noises from all sides? No! You will never create your own true work that way. Just look at all the geniuses in history like Plato, Aristoteles, Newton, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, did they leave their own heritage or the legacy of their family and community to humanity?
As an independent pilgrim, you walk through the desert solitarily and this is the duty that you cannot refuse, because when you meditate and understand the truth, it is the career of your own soul and only then will your soul become valuable. Now listen to the duty of a courageous person: “Refusing to join the crowd is also refusing to be tolerant of yourself.”
It is the only way by which you can train yourself, if you avoid challenges and indulge in your cowardly ego then you are not fulfilling your duty. You have to be yourself so that your writing can be the work of an author named You. But if you are not yourself, you belong to the crowd then your work is just like you, it will be the product of all the authors that overshadow you.
When you evade your duty, you are also evading the authorship of your own work. You are a writer but first of all, you are a human, with dignity and talent. Henry Miller once said “There is no difference between myself as a writer and myself as a person: failure as a writer is also failure as a person.” (The Creative Path - page 145).
Paul Đức
Translated by Dang Linh Chi
TRANH của Paul Eduard Richard Sohn (1834-1912), người Đức
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