Sad, and expired did the clock of time on this quote's pungency. Cancers get cured -- not all, but so many today! Spouses are more faithful than some decades ago. And no one watches TV, all cables are cut and the antenna ariels of rooftops have long ago been blown away in some storm and high wind, unrepaired and unreplaced. Yet the opening sentence remains true enough!

But in this era: 2019, from 2006 on or so, more people live alone than every before, all over the world. So our observations, more of them, go unremarked by the "other" most dear to us, for too many have no "other". Just theyself. As Whitman said "I am a multitude" -- but that was wishfulness. It was a vain concept. Alone, in real life, we decay to singularitys, and then decay to unrepsponsiveness even to small observations about the self. That is today. Sad it is too.