Solitude - the ability to "Be" alone...
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician left behind a body of observations and insights, which later was collected in a book called "Pensees" ( thoughts, in French). Pascal was more a man of the world than an ascetic in the literary sense. Sometimes, when I read the "Pensees", I find, that it has remarkable similarities with aphorisms in the Bhagavad Gita : Strikingl y practical, and oozing with common sense. Not surprising though because Pascal was a trained mathematician of the highest order , hence his thoughts were very precise, incisive and never shies away from the truth. The reason i am reminded of Pascal now is because of a phone call I received a couple of hours ago from a friend in Atlanta. He said he was going mad , restless ,sitting at home, with all this Ice and snow on the roads making it impossible to venture out or do anything. I sympathized with him, but at the back of my mind a particular observation from Pensees came