"You cannot isolate yourself from the crowd - even if you want to"
About this Quote
Total withdrawal is a myth; even deliberate retreat is threaded to other people. The insight cuts two ways. It describes a social fact: our lives are built on networks of language, law, economy, and memory, and no choice we make is sealed off from those systems. It also captures a psychological truth: the very desire to get away is shaped by what the crowd has already impressed upon us. To step back is still to step within a choreography the crowd supplies.
Ivor Novello knew how publics can clasp and pursue a person. A composer, actor, and playwright whose name now crowns British songwriting awards, he lived in the glare of stages and newspapers. Theater is collective by nature: a show exists only when an audience gathers, and a star is manufactured by that convergence. Fame intensifies the point, but it merely spotlights a condition shared by everyone. The grocer and the poet alike depend on others to eat, to speak, to imagine. Even a hermit is defined by the society he renounces.
There is a distinction between solitude and isolation. Solitude can be chosen and nourishing, a boundary that preserves integrity. Isolation, as an absolute severing, is not only impractical but illusory. The crowd persists inside us as habits, desires, fears, and hopes, and outside us as obligations and consequences. Try to vanish and your absence becomes a message the crowd reads; your retreat reenters the circuit as rumor, inspiration, or injury.
The line carries an ethical nudge. If disentanglement is impossible, responsibility remains. What we say and do will ripple, whether we face the crowd or turn from it. The task is not escape but wise participation: to cultivate privacy without denial, to set limits without contempt, and to recognize that interdependence is not a prison but the condition that makes meaning, art, and change possible.
Ivor Novello knew how publics can clasp and pursue a person. A composer, actor, and playwright whose name now crowns British songwriting awards, he lived in the glare of stages and newspapers. Theater is collective by nature: a show exists only when an audience gathers, and a star is manufactured by that convergence. Fame intensifies the point, but it merely spotlights a condition shared by everyone. The grocer and the poet alike depend on others to eat, to speak, to imagine. Even a hermit is defined by the society he renounces.
There is a distinction between solitude and isolation. Solitude can be chosen and nourishing, a boundary that preserves integrity. Isolation, as an absolute severing, is not only impractical but illusory. The crowd persists inside us as habits, desires, fears, and hopes, and outside us as obligations and consequences. Try to vanish and your absence becomes a message the crowd reads; your retreat reenters the circuit as rumor, inspiration, or injury.
The line carries an ethical nudge. If disentanglement is impossible, responsibility remains. What we say and do will ripple, whether we face the crowd or turn from it. The task is not escape but wise participation: to cultivate privacy without denial, to set limits without contempt, and to recognize that interdependence is not a prison but the condition that makes meaning, art, and change possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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