Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Loneliness)

“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people -- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul…we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), “God’s Lonely Man,” originally printed in The American Mercury, October 1941, reprinted in The Hills Beyond (1941)

In high school I devoured the four massive novels of Thomas Wolfe (two published in his lifetime, two cobbled together from manuscripts and published posthumously), but was unaware of this piece until the other day.

I suspect that I’m not the only one who hadn’t noticed it: millions of people who’ve seen Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver undoubtedly don’t know that it was screenwriter Paul Schrader’s tip of the cap to the Wolfe piece.

Most references to “God’s Lonely Man” that I’ve found on the Internet refer to it as an essay; others, as a short story. Virtually all these sources indicate that it was autobiographical. But with Wolfe, how much wasn’t?

In any case, it seems to have been inspired by his childhood and youth in a boardinghouse run by his mother in Asheville, N.C.—in real life, “Old Kentucky Home,” but renamed “Dixieland” in the coming-of-age novel that made his reputation (even as it made him persona non grata at home), Look Homeward, Angel.

When I visited Asheville some years ago, I made it a point to stop at Old Kentucky Home, which over the years became The Thomas Wolfe Memorial. I was fascinated by the stories told about his upbringing. 

With the boy Thomas often required to give up his bedroom at night to accommodate transient visitors of all kinds, I could easily understand the restlessness and alienation—in short, the loneliness—that he wrote about in the above passage.

With all that I learned about the novelist while there, I was deeply saddened to read that, due to Hurricane Helene, this historic site will be closed “indefinitely.”

The Facebook page for the site read: “Due to the intense winds brought on by Hurricane Helene, one of the property’s maple trees has fallen against the historic house. Damage to the structure appears relatively minimal, and our priority in the coming days, as we can safely do so, is to secure the site by having the tree removed and the house thoroughly inspected."

In 1998, due to a still-unsolved act of arson, the house sustained a loss of 20% of the original structure and 15% of its artifact collection. It took nearly six years before it reopened to the public. 

One hopes that the wait won’t be as long this time for admirers of the intensely lyrical novelist that William Faulkner believed possessed ambitions so enormous that he sought to “put all the experience of the human heart on the head of a pin.”