You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other 
people than you know about yourself.  You learn to watch other 
people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against 
loneliness.  If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care 
for a dog, you are avoiding yourself.  The abhorrence of loneliness 
is as natural as wanting to live at all.  If it were otherwise, men 
would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned 
words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed 
continents - each man to see what the other looked like.