Solitude can be terrible, but also desirable. I can see this in myself: at times, when I am alone, I want a friend or two to come visit because I get bored looking at the tips of my shoes or watching a buzzing fly. But I also like to be alone with my soul, to daydream, to imagine the imaginable . . . and the unimaginable. What sense is there in going out into the street to see nothing but the hoods of cars and to suffer from the noise? Silence is nearly impossible today; it’s something precious that is very difficult to find anywhere. For example, if you went to the North Pole to enjoy the silence, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Eskimo immediately appeared on his sled . . . with a noisy portable radio. Can you imagine what the silence must have been like in the Middle Ages? Leaving a town or city, within a few steps you could find silence, or natural sounds, which are marvelous: songs of birds, of cicadas, or the murmur of the rain. We have lost this in our time. There is an infernal instrument that really could have been invented by the devil or by an enemy of mankind: the electric guitar. What diabolical times we live in: crowds, smog, promiscuity, radios, etc. I would happily return to the Middle Ages, as long as it was before the Great Plague of the fourteenth century.