Thomas Wolfe, the author best known for the novel, You Can't Go Home Again, once said this about loneliness:

Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon...is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul is evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears, as the man swarm passes us in the streets we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.1

Of all the ranges of human emotions, the most devastating of all is loneliness. The silence of loneliness is …