I love my solitude so much that I cannot even bear to have others sleeping under the same roof as me. I could never live in Paris, for example. I die a slow death when I’m there. It’s a kind of annihilation of the spirit for me; both my mind and my body are tortured by the consciousness of a vast, seething mass of humanity living around me there, awake or asleep. I tell you, other people’s sleep is even more painful to me than their speech! I can never rest while I know, while I can feel behind that wall, say, the existence of others whose powers of reasoning are temporarily and regularly shut down.

Why am I like this? Who knows? Perhaps the reason is very simple. Maybe I just tire very quickly of anything that is not happening to myself. And there must be thousands like me. There are two kinds of people in the world. First there are those who need others and who are entertained, distracted, even soothed by company. Solitude for this kind of person is a huge, unremitting burden to bear, something as difficult and daunting as crossing a desert or climbing a dangerous glacier. Then there’s the second type of person who gets tired, irritated and finally bored stiff in the company of others. For this kind of person, solitude is a balm, something they can lie back and bask in while their thoughts are allowed to roam free.

In other words we’re talking about a perfectly normal psychological given. Some people are good at living extrovertly, others introvertly. I happen to be one of those whose capacity for attention to the outside world is very small and quickly exhausted. As soon as it reaches its limit I feel this intolerable unease throughout both my mind and my body.

As a result of this I have become, or rather had become, very attached to inanimate objects which were as important to me as human beings. My house has, or had, become a world in which I lived a solitary yet active life, surrounded by familiar objects, furniture and bibelots as lovable to me as human faces. Little by little I filled my house with these things and lived in their midst as happily as in the arms of a beloved woman whose warm, familiar embrace has become a prerequisite to a calm, untroubled existence.