I think perhaps you read the sentence "This one sentence stuck with me as a crystallization of a lot of my fears about human relationships" and mentally added an addendum that read something like "and that is why I intend to abjure all human companionship henceforth!" and decided that you needed to talk me out of this questionable life plan. This is not, in fact, my life plan. We are basically in agreement that human connection is an important part of a happy life. The quote struck me because it seemed so applicable to a situation with a friend who has spent the last year imploding in a way that I really could not have foreseen back when we became friends in high school, and probably wouldn't have understood if I could have foreseen it.

I'm planning to read Bell Irvin Wiley's The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union and Bruce Catton's Army of the Potomac trilogy, which were published in the 1950s and probably outdated for normal purposes, but exactly what an early 1960s college student might read in order to understand his new Civil War veteran crush who just woke up from a hundred year sleep.