Detachment from the world as an attachment to the ego... Who can realize the detachment in which you are as far away from yourself as you are from the world?

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]

When one is a stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.

If one has deserted the world, but one thought still inclines to worldliness, he is not considered as free man nor an ascetic; his inner defilement still survives.

The philosopher, who is himself an abstract form of alienated man, sets himself up as the measure of the alienated world.

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way

Freedom from the world is, in principle, not asceticism, but rather a distance from the world for which all participation in things worldly takes place in the attitude of “as if not.” (1 Cor. 7:29-31)

I felt a tremendous distance between myself and everything real.

But what seems like a reasonable distance to one person might feel too far to somebody else.

It is the wilderness in
the mind, the desert wastes in the heart through which one wanders lost and a stranger. When one is a
stranger to oneself then one is estranged from others too. If one is out of touch with oneself, then one
cannot touch others.

Oh dear God, one misses the land when is far away.

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

..not the familiar paradise, but the unknown - somewhere in a continent that hasn’t been discovered yet by anyone from the civilized countries - I have escaped [in his prints!] because it is almost unbearable to be in our world.