God created man and, finding him not sufficiently alone, gave him a companion to make him feel his solitude more keenly.

Valéry’s aphorism turns the biblical creation story into a paradox about human intimacy. Instead of curing loneliness, companionship can sharpen it: another person becomes a mirror that reveals the irreducible privacy of one’s inner life. The line also hints at the tensions of love and social life—proximity exposes difference, misunderstanding, and the limits of communication. In this reading, “solitude” is not merely being without others but the existential condition of being a self, which even the closest relationship cannot abolish. The wit is characteristically Valéryan: skeptical of consoling narratives, it treats human relations as intensifiers of consciousness rather than simple remedies.