7 June

The experience of people in solitary confinement often seems to challenge some of our ideas. You’d think being locked in a tiny room, alone, would make a person feel hemmed in. But often it’s the opposite, they never feel more expansive and at one with all of the world as when they’re locked away like this. The silence does a lot of the work, and absence of conversation, our experience of life is so closely shaped by language and its categories. This sort of isolation and silence drives some people mad. But I think we’d all benefit from this sort of detachment and silence, a little bit every day. If you can’t be happy alone and silent, you will never be really happy in any other way.