Kieran Setiya

that loving someone for himself is loving him for his character. That just isn’t so. You are not your character, an assemblage of quirks and traits, virtues and vices, all of which you can outlive. You are a particular, concrete human being, not defined by the attributes you have. Being loved for yourself, therefore, is not being loved for qualities that make you you, and being valued as a friend is not the same as being admired.

The very essence of life is human contact, and the affirmation of existence that comes with it. Losing that contact, you lose your sense of identity. You become nothing. . . . I became invisible even to myself.” We need the affirmation found in love.

In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s books, Earth is part of a galactic computer designed, ironically,
to find the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Notoriously, the answer is “42.”)