October 16, 2026

Alone In The Room

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Pascal wrote this in seventeenth-century France, part of the fragmentary notes on human nature later published as Pensées, as he watched the nobility chase hunts, card games, and court gossip to avoid their own company. Pico Iyer chose this exact line as the opening epigraph to The Art of Stillness, using it to frame his entire case for why sitting still has become the most radical act available to us. Iyer had spent decades as a travel writer circling the globe before he noticed that the place he most needed to visit was the quiet of his own room. The line hits harder now than it did in Pascal's salons, when a phone in every pocket makes sitting quietly alone feel almost impossible.