One of the reasons I stopped feeling lonely when I began to study Aesthetic Realism is that it taught me I wasn't just separate from things; I was also together with them, being affected by them every moment. I had a wonderful time seeing how this was true about myself, and other people, and my photographs reflected what I was learning.
 
Here, we have three people sitting in a doorway, each one engrossed in reading a newspaper. It looks like a tight fit, but they seem quite comfortable. I'm sure they were aware of each other's presence, but the photograph "works" because they don't seem to be.
 
As I thought about this photograph, and others, sentences came to mind from "The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict," a chapter from Self and World by Eli Siegel. They describe with kind eloquence what we have all experienced, but could not put into words:

All of us, in a way, are separate from the world. We seem to end with our bodies. If our neighbor, only half a foot away, has a nail in his shoe, we might know about it; but we don't feel it the way he does. If a bed companion blows his nose, our nose is unblown. A blister on a finger touching ours is not our blister. And we seem to have a whole secret manufactory of all kinds of views, impressions, perceptions, outlooks, considerations, desires—all for ourselves, alone. So we are alone in our blood and our bones and our thoughts. It seems we are separate, if we want to feel that way.

And yet we can look out. Not a thing fails to act on us, once we think about it. To think about something means that it acts on us; for when our thoughts are about anything, this thing has changed our minds. We cannot live without ever so many objects, from everywhere. The ground we walk on is unthinkable as not being. Our food is a neighbor which becomes ourselves. The air is a universal indispensable. And we need people. We may even need them to despise them. Everything is around us, indefinitely close, indefinitely inescapable, indefinitely changing ourselves, becoming ourselves. This means we are not only separate, we are together.