This statement is so marvelous, I just had to post it.
My generation has survived social death in all its variations, and I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me for the intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted me to disappear into divinity, the theologians into sociology, the sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the journalists into metaphysics, the philosophers into law, and—need I say it?—the lawyers into hell, which as a member of our present world, I never had left.
For nobody leaves hell all by himself without going mad. Society is a hell as long as man or woman is alone. And the human soul dies from consumption in the hell of social catastrophe unless it makes common cause with others. In the community that common sense rebuilds, after the earthquake, upon the ashes on the slope of Vesuvius, the red wine of life tastes better than anywhere else. And a man writes a book, even as he stretches out his hand, so that he may find that he is not alone in the survival of humankind.
-Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Farewell to Descartes, p.19