Subjective Experience and Living on Your Lonesome.

This is a dual-purposed post. The first is to share something with you all, this an excerpt from Demian by Hermann Hesse touching on a relevant topic for our class. It's the prologue to the book, so if you like it, I hope you feel inclined to read it.
The Prologue is in video form above, and text form below. Catering to different types of learning styles I suppose.
" I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. If it were possible I would reach back farther still - into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into the distant ancestral past. Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude towards their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man's life, which they can recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail. I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist's is to him---for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not an invented, or possible or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but a unique being of flesh and blood. Yet what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood than ever before, and men---each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature---are therefore shot wholesale nowadays. If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; and that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross. Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, just as I will die more easily once I have completed this story. I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams---like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves. Each man's life represents a road towards himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that---one in an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth---the slime and eggshells of his primeval past---with him until the end of his days...... Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human. We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us----experiments of the depths---strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone. "

Those who read this, I hope it touched you in some way- whether it be understanding the essence Hesse is trying to capture, despite the limits of language, or whether it be a particularly poignant line you found simply well articulated and relative to your own life. Now that we have done that, here is another video, this one by Dr. Brule, with a few tips for happier days while living on your lonesome. Watch it, ya turkey.
Enjoy!