Case study 1

I am definitely not a misanthrope.
I call myself a lover of mankind, and I try to act as such. But it's true that mankind eludes me. I see nothing in men but rivalry, gliding like ghosts to their errands. I know for sure I am not like them. As for women, they are a blank. They are and remain a problem, even to themselves. They are a riddle. Watch them slouch with shopping-bags through streets. What can they be thinking?
And so it is that I, estranged from man, am cast among them, slowly, ponderously walking, through an autumnal town centre, in a post-industrial city. To an office building I go, and ascend the bare steps up to Level 3. The place smells like a hospital, and is so scrupulously clean that one has an urge to defile it. After standing at a plastic podium for a while, jabbing my finger on a touchscreen, my name is called and a small, curiously twisted woman with a faint moustache moves a slip of paper in front of me, which I sign with my name. This is my life and cross to bear.
I was explaining to someone, some interlocutor in my head, "I used myself as a case study. Effects of solitude on the human person. One goes through phases. First of all, one feels liberated. The mind is refreshed and acute. The deliciousness of the solitary vices, the solitary virtues, are happily indulged in. Lust and philosophy, life and history as joyful, diminutive games, played on the blank wall of the mind. Everything incommunicable and private, everything endogenous and subjective, can be revelled in. At first these encounters with the bare self are unchallenging.
After a while though, usually late at night, one suddenly finds in oneself, arising unbidden, a curious, hateful dismay. One discovers it like one would discover a cavity in a back tooth, with a sort of disgust and shame, and at the same time, a morbid curiosity about the sources and progress of the decay. It comes at bedtime, as a strangely definite sense that one has left something undone. It is when one tries to pinpoint exactly what has been left undone, that one becomes puzzled. Why can't I happily sleep, fold etc. to bed? And then the whole, stark truth wells up at you. I haven't lived. I haven't lived today. Something, some opportunity or other, has somehow been missed, or rather, it never arose, and this not arising, this failure of phenomena to appear, this absence, is felt like a presence, like a ghost in the room which stands all night by your bed and prevents sleep.