Excellent.

Years ago, on a blue-and-gold day which I remember perfectly, among the stacks of a Tucson bookstore into which I happened to wander, I came across an obscure passage in an old anthology of essays. It was a passage written by someone I'd never heard of whose name was Herbert Spencer. For some reason, at that time, it struck me as almost divinely inspired, I'm not sure why. I remember reading it and then lifting my eyes and squinting at the ceiling. It felt like I’d just come across a great organizing principle or organizing mechanism — an absolute by means of which I’d forever be able to unravel the complexities.

What you wrote here reminds me of that passage — which, incidentally, and to my frustration, I’m unable to locate. It’s not in my notes, not in any of my books, not anywhere online. But I do remember it fairly well. Half quoting and half paraphrasing, let’s say, some obscure Herbert Spencer passage I read years ago, in Tucson, Arizona, on a blue-and-gold April day:

It is a condition of evolved sentience that each and every individual person spends the majority of life alone inside the confines of her or his own mind. A cost seems associated with this, different for each individual, and amounting to a sort of psychological toll. Yet it seems to me perfectly obvious that those we love most -- those we most cherish and with whom we most wish to spend our time -- are those who reflect back to us the deepest values of our own soul.