True solitude is when the most restless part of a human being, his longing to forget where he is, born on earth in order to die, comes to rest and listens in a kind of agreed peace. In solitude, once the taste has settled, a man can think upon death with as much pleasure as upon life, and it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, and that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.
Thousands of days and nights spent in the wilderness taught me that a person can never truly know another, or be known by another, and that the pleasure of life is in the trying. A man can never convey fully what it is that so strangely disturbs him, the uneasy unrest in him that nothing material can properly satisfy. It is a fear of accepting this which makes a man most fear what he thinks to be loneliness, a being alone, without other people…
Warriors: Life and death among the Somalis (Eland, London, 1993)
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