19
From my fifteenth year―save for a single interval―I have lived about as solitary a life
as a modern man can have. I mean by this that the number of hours, days, months, and
years that I have spent alone has been immense and extraordinary. I propose, therefore,
to describe the experience of human loneliness exactly as I have known it. The whole
conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and
curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central
and inevitable fact of human existence.