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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.
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Of Loneliness
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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I meant to write a letter to Richard Deming after zooming to his reading and talk last May in celebration of his stellar book This Exquisite Loneliness, but I did not. Blame it on my exquisite loneliness. Don’t get me wrong. I am gregarious and outgoing. Like my golden doodle. I love people. But I savor being alone. Or maybe I am just accustomed to being alone. Even as a child, I was a loner. Other kids lived in neighborhoods and hung out together in gravel pits or play grounds. I felt like an outsider if I joined them on occasion. Our house was set atop a hilltop surrounded with woods. I didn’t really understand hanging out with friends as a norm. Sure, there was school. But even there, I felt solitary, and one teacher saw it in me. In third grade, Miss Dwyer picked me to play the rebellious mouse that improvises a dance outside the circle my classmates rigidly performed as positions on an imaginary clockface. The tune was Leroy Anderson’s “The Syncopated Clock.” The worse aspects of my childhood loneliness were the night terrors. Sitting up in bed at night with the light on, terrified if I turned it off and closed my eyes—what could stop me from dying? I was ashamed of the feeling and did not seek comfort from my parents. That isolation within the intimacy of family was the central mystery of my childhood.
The old saw holds solitude to be a blessing, a contemplative space, a refuge. One chooses solitude, but not loneliness. It chooses one, surprises one, leads to melancholy, depression, and obsessing on mortality. Loneliness is rarely invited. The government warns of an epidemic of loneliness. But I have learned to savor my loneliness in acknowledgement of the existential truth that we are each a miraculous and lonely moment in an infinitude of space-time, a reality we all share on the inner though it’s hard to share on the outer.
When I saw the title of Richard Deming’s book, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity, I leapt for it. I knew we would be kindred. We are not related, except probably somewhere back in the 1600’s, when ancestral Demings settled in Connecticut, finding the Massachusetts colony a bit too restrictive. The book is a blend of memoir detailing the author’s struggles with addiction and an exploration of six writers and artists whose loneliness inspired them to find beauty, meaning, and acts of compassion at our shared vulnerability. The cast of characters offers a sense of the capaciousness of Deming’s endeavor: among them, Zora Neale Hurston, Melanie Klein, Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans, and Rod Serling.
The turn toward endless fragmentation in our digital lives and cruelty in our political climate invites worsening experiences of loneliness. Loneliness is emotional, psychological, and cultural. It drives us to desire connection with others. In his chapter on Benjamin, Deming writes:
Growing up in an affluent Jewish household in Berlin and its outskirts, Benjamin enjoyed an idyllic childhood. Raised thinking that there would be cultural and therefore financial support for his work as a critic and scholar, he hadn’t anticipated that there would be a shift in intellectual life with the rise of fascism. In other words, he lived to see the opportunities for intellectual pursuits shrink and close. How could he not read that as a world indicating it no longer valued what he believed to be so vitally important? He was cast out of the world he grew up in because he couldn’t help but pursue a life of the mind. This is probably the worst feeling of loneliness: to live in a time that simply doesn’t want you.
Of Serling:
No matter what the situation, The Twilight Zone entered the lives of people where they actually were. In reaching out and recognizing the pain countless people were feeling—displacement, alienation, isolation—Serling was creating a gesture that might make people feel included and acknowledged. A shared fear of loneliness can be a way of feeling connected to others.
“The place is here. The time is now,” says Serling in the opening lines of “Where is Everybody?” He then adds, “And the journey into the shadows which we are about to watch could be our journey.” There, in that moment of connection, there, in that it could be any of us, there, in that insistence of the law of substitution, there, if for no other reason, is where we can learn to free ourselves from the shame that surrounds feeling lonely.
And there is where the prose sings, as it does throughout the book, pulling the reader along on its tide. Deming writes with beautiful clarity, immediacy, compassion, and openness. I love the way the book is the essaying marriage of feeling and thinking. I found myself falling into memories of my childhood, replaying, reassessing, “fleshing out,” as Deming writes of Benjamin, “the memories that were the DNA of who he became.” I remember my now departed colleague Richard Shelton telling students that memoir was always driven by the question, “How did I become the person that I am?”
“He’s dead.” That’s the book’s opening line. Okay, says the reader. This is not going to be a stultifying book of scholarly theory. He’s speaking of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman. A friend with whom Deming got sober in the 1990s has called with the news about Hoffman’s death from an overdose. “But he’s sober,” he says to his friend. “That’s what everyone thought,” the friend replies. When he gets the call, Deming is writing about Hoffman’s role in Synecdoche, New York, a brutal synchronicity. “I’m no actor,” he writes, “but I know those parts too well myself.” The death becomes a catalyst for the author to explore various dimensions of loneliness out of his own sense of personal urgency. “I recognized the latent potency of loneliness.”
Of himself, he writes:
Rochester may have been where I dried out, but it was not a cure for my loneliness. I was left on my own to practice drums and piano hours every day, making my way into the school to take my classes, and then drift back to my parents’ house, where I stayed up for hours, hiding bottles of wine though I was supposed to be getting off the sauce. Every week, after my lessons, I went to the art-house cinema and saw whatever was playing. Sitting alone in the dark, whole worlds flashing across the screen, I fell into other people’s lives, other people’s stories. Since in being lonely we feel only the throes of emotional distance, it is through art, books, music, movies, that we can collect our glimpses of others’ lives, that we can collect our fellow travelers.
So I guess this is my letter to Richard Deming, a letter-as-essay so that others can be gathered into the theater of my appreciation for a remarkable and tender book that so movingly speaks of our loneliness and what draws us together.
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Alison Hawthorne Deming has two books coming this spring. The poetry collection Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower (Red Hen Press) and the anthology The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss & Connection (Storey Press). She is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.
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