How we cite our quotes: (Preface if applicable, Paragraph)
Quote #7
No one came near to him. There was no link left, and no one could have had any part in his life even had anyone wished it. (38)
This sentence, which comes from the Treatise on the Steppenwolf, sounds like a punishment. It seems like Harry has no escape because he has built up his loneliness so securely.
Quote #8
His tendency is to explain Mozart's perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who suffer to become men, that loneliness of the Garden of Gethsemane. (62)
So Harry thinks that Mozart is a genius because he has been blessed; it sounds like the author of the Treatise thinks that the way to being a genius is actually to suffer a whole lot and to isolate oneself completely. At least that would give you time to think? And the shout-out to the Garden of Gethsemane is the ultimate lonely scene: Jesus is praying for his life when one of his closest friends betrays him.
Quote #9
She came to see me now and then, or I made the journey to her, and since both of us were lonely, difficult people related somehow to one another in soul, and sickness of soul, there was a link between us that held in spite of all. (79)
It sounds like Harry and Erica, his on-again off-again girlfriend, don't have too much in common other than being lonely. It seems interesting that Harry, who works so hard to be alone and lonely, would even bother with having a girlfriend. Maybe she just reaffirms to him that he is unlovable because they can't get along.