{"id":1364,"date":"2023-06-24T16:21:44","date_gmt":"2023-06-24T16:21:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/06\/24\/the-beauty-of-the-solitary-life\/"},"modified":"2023-06-24T16:21:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-24T16:21:44","slug":"the-beauty-of-the-solitary-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/06\/24\/the-beauty-of-the-solitary-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Beauty of the Solitary Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Thomas Merton, <em>The Journals<\/em>, vol. 6, 24 June 1966, p. 344: &quot;The beauty of the solitary life . . . is that you can throw away all the masks and forget them until you return among people.&quot;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">For, as one of my aphorisms has it, &quot;The step into the social is by dissimulation.&quot;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\"><span style=\"font-family: georgia, palatino; font-size: 14pt;\">Before I quit my cell, I put on my face, don my mask, <a href=\"https:\/\/williamfvallicella.substack.com\/p\/are-you-a-gray-man\">go gray<\/a>, and try not to appear too intense.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thomas Merton, The Journals, vol. 6, 24 June 1966, p. 344: &quot;The beauty of the solitary life . . . is that you can throw away all the masks and forget them until you return among people.&quot; For, as one of my aphorisms has it, &quot;The step into the social is by dissimulation.&quot; Before I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/06\/24\/the-beauty-of-the-solitary-life\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Beauty of the Solitary Life&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73,72,465],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-merton-thomas","category-sage-advice","category-solitude"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1364\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}