"Far from dull quietude, she argued that aloneness was a kind of entry into adventure; it is to “go on voyages of discovery” to “find the islands of the Imagination.” Aloneness can be comforting, if you understand its shadow-language, its candlelit corridors, its night-sky vastness. It can even, Bishop suggested at the end, be a kind of presence in and of itself, a “companion in ourselves who is with us all our lives… the rare person,” she wrote, now seemingly describing her own inner avatar of aloneness, “whose heart quickens when a bird climbs high and alone in the clear air.” ”