So we practice being “alone with”—and, if successful, end up with a self peopled by those who have mattered most. Hannah Arendt talks about the solitary person as free to keep himself company. He is not lonely, but always accompanied, “together with himself.” For Arendt, “All thinking, strictly speaking, is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-in-one does not lose contact with the world of my fellow-men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought.”
