"I stepped right out to the edge of the precipice. I thought that when Caroline saw me afterward she'd cry, "I loved that mashed-up piece of human wreckage." I looked over at the terrifying drop and my stomach lurched and all my joints locked and I had the following horrible thought: You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that." -Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole
This shit reminds me of something else I read, in the novel Shōgun:
"It's a saying they [the Japanese] have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except himself alone, hidden only God knows where." -James Clavell, Shōgun
I seriously dig on this kind of thinking. You really never can know another human being.
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