One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

What does being alone mean to you? Keeping your own company, without any stranger about.

True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself. This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew.

I do not presume that you are as I picture you. No more are you, as I have already asserted, that one whom you picture to yourselves, but rather any number of beings at one and the same time, in accordance with all the possibilities of being that are yours, and depending upon accidents, relations and circumstances.

do you feel like fathoming the terror-inspiring jest that lies beneath the pacific natural-seemingness of daily relations, those relations which impress you as altogether normal and ordinary, beneath the tranquil appearance of the so-called reality of things? This, in the name of Heaven, is the same jest that works you up into a fury every five minutes or so, and which causes you to exclaim to the friend at your side, “I beg your pardon! But how does it come that you don’t see this? Are you blind?” And your friend does not see it, but sees another thing, when you all the while feel that he ought to be seeing what you see, as you see it. He, on the contrary, sees it as it appears to him; and for him, therefore, the blind man is yourself.

domineering. Each one wants to impose upon others that world he has within, as if it were an outward entity, as if all ought to see it after his fashion, it being impossible for others to exist there save as he sees them.”

“Why is it, when one thinks of killing himself, that he imagines himself as being dead, no longer to himself, but to others?”