the self-contained life - Howard Spring

After I had eaten my evening meal I wandered out on to the beach where the tide was coming in sharply, a tumble of white in the darkness. I walked as far as the cliff beyond the beach, and I sat down there on a tussock of sea-pinks, listening to the surge of the water, watching the stars that the clouds covered and unveiled and the cluster of humble lights half a mile away that was Penmael. I felt lonely. My body was warm, but I was chilled to the soul's marrow. This was the oddest feeling I had ever known: this loneliness. Aloneness was something else. I had sought it eagerly, welcomed it when found, but I had never been lonely in my aloneness. Now I was so lonely that I could stand it no longer.

The world is an onion, Mr Menheniot, skin within skin, and anyone who thinks it's nothing but the outside one that lies in the dung can have it if he wants it. A real man of the world knows them all, down to the heart's core of the thing.
Not all on the surface, is it, like a nice David-Cox water-colour.

And there's so much gossip in the [countryside], Mr Menheniot. It makes a person uncomfortable.