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 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 abhorence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make the alphabet, nor to have fashioned words of what were only animal sounds, not to have crossed continents-each man to see what the other looked like.
Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind-such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night.

You are the stranger

(Beryl Markham)