The Virtues of Isolation

In the ’80s, the Italian journalist and author Tiziano Terzani, after many years of reporting across Asia, holed himself up in a cabin in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. “For a month I had no one to talk to except my dog Baoli,” he wrote in his travelogue A Fortune Teller Told Me. Terzani passed the time with books, observing nature, “listening to the winds in the trees, watching butterflies, enjoying silence.” For the first time in a long while he felt free from the incessant anxieties of daily life: “At last I had time to have time.”

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“If there ever comes a day you knock on my door, carrying a basket filled with the juiciest and ripest apples, know that I learned my lesson, and I will not take a bite. Please understand, this is not about rejection or resentment; this is about protection and moving upward.”

-written by Dorianne Young

Anecdotes, Social

Thought #3

Last night, I was watching a beautiful movie (Palmeras en la nieve), in which one particular scene stood out to me. Mind you, this scene has become such a norm in other movies, it never stands out and is sadly a normalcy in any society around the world. In the film, one of the female characters decides to visit her father’s past life and travel to Equatorial Guinea, where he had lived out his youth. Her aunt proceeds to tell her “you must be careful, it is not safe for a woman,” and instantly this struck a nerve in me. As mentioned, this comment IS common in movies and in real life, but it has always been accepted that women MUST be more careful than men in most situations. The question is, why is this normal? Why do women HAVE to be more cautious than men?

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