Ascesis ...

‘The ascetic makes a virtue of a state of distress.’

‘In solitude the solitary man consumes himself, in the crowd the crowd consumes him. Now choose.’

—Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human, §76, §348)

Probably a soul-doctor would to most prescribe more solitude, that they may develop inwardness. But my prescription would say: Take two socialisation pills at mealtimes, however hard to swallow, wash them down by helloing three people, whom you do not know, and remember that your athenaeum is not a hideaway. My beloved Pascal wrote that man does not know how to stay quietly in his room (Pensée 136). I know how to do that rather well. (‘The celle welle continued waxeth swete.’*) But I do not know how to mix noisily at a party, that's the thing. Had I lived in another age, everything would be settled naturally. There were places for me then, more or less corresponding to my inner preoccupations, monasteries and hermitages and anchoritic towers.† But it seems I live in the present age, chronologically displaced, an anachronism. All the same, I know that I would make a poor monk. Yes, I would make a most excellent recluse, a withdrawn melancholy penitent summa cum laude. But that's not the same, is it? Truly, I would be too much a worldling among the monastics then, as I am too much a monastic among the worldlings now.

*Thomas à Kempis (Imitatio Christi, I.20.26). 

†Then again, ‘habyte and tonsure lytel avaylen’ (Ibid., I.17.6).