Freya Stark on the need for solitude

“Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting up into new seas, the history of the world develops around us.”
–Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins (1934)