None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit.

It is an admonition to myself when I am reading other people's books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else's work.

At some point just about all of us experience loneliness. In a sense, it is what it means to be a sentient animal, to have an experience of separation from others.

Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.

There are degrees of loneliness, ways in which the experience of loneliness deepens, becomes something like what we might call a way of life. This way of life is both what is most damaging to us as a culture, and, paradoxically, contributes to its richness. It may in the end be our lasting contribution to the life of our planet.

Usually, we think that "good" loneliness is what we call "solitude," the choice of some alone-time. But I want to press on with the negative dimension, to look at ways in which a fundamental sense of being separated from others shapes who we are and why.

In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like "When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn't need to write it."