Worldwide, the twentieth century has seen the rise of extraordinary concentrations of economic and political power - evoking the people as the source of power while simultaneously privatizing its most meaningful exercise. Democracy always seems to be at least slightly elusive under such conditions.

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.

I'm pretty sure my dog, Pip, gets lonely when there is no one to be with him. But we humans can end up with a gnawing worry about that separation possibly becoming a permanent condition.

One of the reasons I always come back to representations of loneliness in plays, films, and literature is that they give us specific examples of the powerful hold that it has on us, and yet, paradoxically, by representing what can't really be represented, so to speak, they give us ways of going forward even as we fall apart.

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.

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.

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.

We can never leave loneliness behind completely - it is part of what forms us.