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This passage at the end of the book is very interesting to me.  At first I did not see it as Erik finding his “self” in a Whitman like sense.  I saw this as a way to say that if you are aware of yourself, you are going to be lonely. The way I interpreted this was that if there is no one then you can’t be lonely, if you aren’t aware of yourself then you won’t know you are lonely.  This is not a positive message: self-awareness leads to unhappiness.  But the more I thought about it, I reinterpreted it to mean that if you are too introverted you will be unhappy.  If the boundary between the inside and outside loosens, meaning if you are more aware of the outside then just what is on your inside than you can realize that there is more to life than just the loneliness you think you feel.  I think the ending message is there needs to be a balance between internal and external awareness, and that is Erik’s goal to happiness.