loneliness is not a function of solitude · S4

Buried flat in the great catalog of things a halfway house teaches sits one of the book's most compact statements of the theme: you can be jammed into a full house, drilled daily in fellowship and shared identification, and be no less alone for it. Loneliness is decoupled from being by yourself, which means the cure the whole recovery world offers, community, does not automatically touch it; the aloneness is a condition of the self, not of the room, and the room can be crowded.