Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

Conrad distinguishes everyday “loneliness” from an existential condition: the sudden, unmasked recognition that one is finally unshared and unrescued in one’s inner life. He suggests that most people survive by clinging to consolations—memories, hopes, self-deceptions, or narratives that give the self a sense of belonging. Only in rare “fatal” alignments of circumstance does the protective fiction drop away, revealing what he calls “moral solitude,” a terror so absolute that sustained exposure would shatter sanity. The passage reflects Conrad’s recurring theme that civilization and identity depend on fragile psychological veils, and that the human mind requires illusion as a kind of mercy.