SPUTNIK Sweetheart

Coming back home from my BookClub last night, where we discussed Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, I decided to put up a little passage of the book.
In this chapter the narrator talks about loneliness and the ephemerality of encounters and friendships.
It is a very sad part of the book, but yet very subtle and touching.
HERE WE GO:

But all I felt was an incomparable loneliness. Before I knew it, the world around was drained of color. From the shabby mountaintop, the ruins of those empty feelings, I could see my own life stretching out into the future. It looked just like an illustration in a science fiction novel I read as a child: the desolate surface of a deserted planet. No sign of life at all. Each day seemed to last for ever, the air either boiling hot or freezing. The spaceship that brought me here had disappeared, and I was stuck. I'd have to survive on my own.
(...)


Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves.
Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?
(...)


Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.