Quote of the Day (Philip Roth, on Loneliness)

“There is no protest to be lodged against loneliness—not all the bombing campaigns in history have made a dent in it. The most lethal of manmade explosives can't touch it.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth (1933-2018), American Pastoral (1997)

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.”

Quote of the Day (Lorraine Hansberry, on ‘The Thing That Makes You Exceptional’)

“Eventually it comes to you: the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely.” —African-American playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), To Be Young, Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words (1969)

Quote of the Day (Brian Doyle, on ‘The House of the Heart’)

“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”— Spiritual author-editor Brian Doyle (1956-2017), One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike (2019)

I took the image accompanying this post in July 2013 at Lake Chautauqua, in upstate New York. I think it conveys something of the sense of loneliness and wonder that the late Brian Doyle was expressing here.

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on Loneliness and Storytelling)

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say and to feel—‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’” —American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968), “In Awe of Words,” The Exonian, 75th anniversary edition, Exeter University (1930)

Quote of the Day (Irwin Shaw, on a Lonely American in Paris)

“From the stories he had heard from other young Americans in Paris, it had never occurred to Tibbell that he would have to face so many nights of loneliness and vague, unformed yearning once he had established himself in the city. But he was shy with girls and clumsy with men and he saw now that shyness and clumsiness were exportable articles that passed from country to country without tax or quota restrictions and that a solitary man was as likely to find himself alone and unremarked in Paris as in New York. Each night, after a silent dinner with only a book for companion, Tibbell, with his neat American haircut, his uncreased, neat Dacron suit, his naïve, questing, blue, polite American eyes, would go from one crowded terrasse of St. Germain to another, drinking as little as he dared, waiting for the one brilliant night when he would be noticed by some glorious, laughing band of young people who, with the legendary freedom of the capital, would seize upon him, appreciate him, sweep him along with them in their expeditions among the joyous tables of the Flore, the Epi Club, the Brasserie Lipp and out to the gay and slightly sinful inns in the smiling green countryside beyond Paris.

“But the one brilliant night never arrived.”—American novelist and short-story master Irwin Shaw (1913-1984), “Love on a Dark Street,” in Short Stories: Five Decades (1978)

In a prior post, I wrote about the classic story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses.” But that much-anthologized bit of short fiction hardly encapsulates the full achievement of Irwin Shaw. The short story quoted above, written nearly a quarter century after “Girls,” gives as poignant a picture as I can think of a young person alone in a city and aching hopelessly for love. (The title alone was evocative and haunting enough to do double duty as the name for his 1965 collection of short stories written over the prior decade.)

In a foreword to a later edition of the “Five Decades” story collection, the late critic Alfred Kazin wrote of Shaw’s “inability to separate himself from a particular time.” What was meant as an appreciation comes off as a half-apology. No, in fact, the emotions that Shaw depicts so skillfully  are universal, crossing entire ages, for all searchers mentally marooned out of their comfort zone, longing for an emotional anchor.

Quote of the Day (Stephen Marche, on the ‘Beauty of Facebook’)

“The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society—the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact. Instead, we have the lovely smoothness of a seemingly social machine. Everything’s so simple: status updates, pictures, your wall.”— Stephen Marche, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?”, The Atlantic, May 2012

Quote of the Day (Eugene Delacroix, on Creation and Loneliness)

“What torments my soul is its loneliness. The more it expands among friends and the daily habits or pleasures, the more, it seems to me, it flees me and retires into its fortress. The poet who lives in solitude, but who produces much, is the one who enjoys those treasures we bear in our bosom, but which forsake us when we give ourselves to others. When one yields oneself completely to one's soul, it opens itself completely.”—French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), from his journal, May 14, 1824, quoted in H.W. Janson and Anthony F. Janson, History of Art, Sixth Edition (2001)