GO AWAY! One of my favorite things in the whole wide world has got to be solitude. I mean, how can you beat it? It's free, absolutely free. But, at the same time, priceless. Whenever someone asks me why I like to be alone so much I always tell them that it's really for the sake of other people. The response to this usually goes something like, " ... What? How could it be for others? When you're alone it's like ... for you." Well, that's true. It is for me. But it doesn't end there. I don't want to be alone just for me, although, in a sense, I do. It's kind of complicated. The best comparison I can think of is cleaning your house. Sometimes we clean and straighten our house for ourselves. The messes we are prone to make in it reach a saturation point and we are virtually forced into cleaning it. Either that or risk tripping over something and hurting ourselves. When the saturation point is reached, though, we more than likely clean up for our own sakes, just because we can't stand it anymore. A saturation point means, after all, a point beyond which living is not possible, and the point of having a home is to live in it. But sometimes we clean our house for someone else, someone we plan to entertain. In either case, we're usually alone when we're doing the cleaning. It would be downright strange to have the company over ahead of time to help you clean the house - before they come over! Whenever I have solitude, which, it seems, is never often enough, I do pretty much the same thing, but with my mind, which is, when you think of it, like the soul's house. And just like the physical house, the mind also gets messy, and reaches its own kind of saturation point. At those times we absolutely must have time to ourselves to clean up. Otherwise, we would be completely worthless to anyone else. And in the same way that you wouldn't want company over before you cleaned your house, you wouldn't want anyone around when it's time to gather your thoughts, which is essentially what you do when you're alone. So you see, it makes some kind of sense after all. I want to be alone for the sake of other people. I want to tend to some messes I've made in my soul's house, like thoughts laying around all over the place that need to be put up somewhere so I can nurture them later, or perhaps throw them in the trash. If I don't do this, I'll have it pressing on my mind and won't be able to properly listen to you expound upon the eternal forms, which will of course upset you and likely make you talk bad about me, how I never listen and so on.
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