Time & Perspective Quote by Wole Soyinka

Exile, in Soyinka's telling, isn’t solitude; it’s a kind of clandestine census. The line moves with the quiet shock of recognition: he leaves, and instead of escaping a mood, he discovers a constituency. "Others who felt the same way" reads like a small sentence with a large political payload. Depression and pessimism aren’t framed as private weakness but as a shared, sharpened response to a broken public reality. When he says they "seek me out", he’s sketching an informal network that forms when formal civic life is policed or poisoned. The future becomes a topic you discuss in corners, in whispers, with the people who can’t say these things safely at scale.

The rhetorical force is in the doubling: "we'd meet... they'd come... we'd talk". The repetition mimics the rhythm of underground contact, a pattern of discreet gatherings that replaces open debate. And then the kicker: their despair is "every bit as acute as mine". That phrase refuses the romantic myth of the lone dissident. Soyinka, the celebrated dramatist, doesn’t elevate his suffering above the crowd; he levels it. Acute means clinical, cutting, and immediate - not a vague melancholy, but a diagnosis of the times.

Context matters: Soyinka’s career is braided with confrontation - prison, censorship, exile - under regimes that made pessimism a rational assessment. The subtext is bracing: when a society drives its most outspoken artists away, it doesn’t erase dissent. It redistributes it, compresses it, and, in private, makes it contagious.