At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving around the globe—from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation—and yet it is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, and easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. But what if instead of shying away from loneliness, we embraced it as something we can learn from and as something that will draw us closer to one another?

In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans’s photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele’s revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling’s uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century.

This singular meditation on loneliness reveals how we might transform the pain of emotional isolation and become more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.

Excerpt

From Chapter Four: The Art of Being Invisible

During the worst period of my active addiction, I was a black-out drinker because I wanted to make myself disappear. The loneliness that I have wrestled with since I was a little kid stood at the core of my substance abuse. Where Zora Neale Hurston found visions as a means to navigate the pain of loneliness, I found instead drugs and alcohol. Even before the drinking, I had come to feel that I was a ghost haunting my own life. Looking into a mirror was like seeing a shadowy figure pass by an empty window at midnight, and the drinking and the drugs were a way to either propel myself through that emptiness or to slip inside it, as if stepping into that mirror.

Many nights during some of my worst, most vulnerable times, I roamed the streets of Boston with a flask of Jack Daniels tucked in my coat sleeve, asking random strangers what time it was. I never asked more than that, never tried to prompt a conversation—it was a form of existential sonar. I sent out waves that people bounced back to me, proving, at least provisionally, that I did exist. Other nights I might sit in the apartment and call random phone numbers.

“Is Paul there?” I would ask, pleasantly, my tongue slushing the last word around in my mouth like a sloppy peppermint. I didn’t actually know anyone named Paul, but, of course, that wasn’t the point.

“There’s no one by that name here,” or, more pointedly, “fuck off,” the voice that answered would explain. Sometimes a Paul would in fact come on the line and I would have to sputter out that I must have had the wrong name. No call lasted more than thirty seconds. I would repeat this process several times in succession, and then I would drink myself into oblivion.

The pattern was clear: a need for connection, no matter how anemic; a frustration with the transience of that unsatisfying connection; a retreat into a state of radical, profound disconnection between myself and a world that I thought had no interest in me, i.e. blackout drunkenness. That, as became clear to me, as I am reminded all the time, was not sustainable. In the years of my sobriety, I’ve sought out new methods for understanding and reframing that recurring feeling of being outside-it-all. If I had to live with loneliness, I wanted to, needed to discover what it had to teach me.

What I have learned about loneliness from Walter Benjamin is, in part, that it can actually heighten one’s sense of attention. Feeling outside of things can offer a widened perspective on what surrounds us all the time. If we try to burrow into the hidden lives of things, for instance, rather than hide out, or pretend to be asleep, or get drunk or high, there’s a chance of uncovering a sheer volume of meaningfulness. That insight can create some sense of connection between a person and his or her or their surroundings, a tether to hold onto, even when it feels like we’re hurtling ever outward. If loneliness is ultimately an affliction of perception, then the task is to find ways to work with perspective.

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During my nightly journeying across Berlin, from time to time came rushing back to me those evenings years before when, drunk and high, I had stumbled through the streets of Boston, milling around the then shabby (and now stringently gentrified) Kenmore Square, lying in the shadow of Fenway. I’d slip (without ID) into the Rat, the rough-hewn punk/new wave club, hustle past the homeless encampment under the Bowker Overpass, maybe pausing to score some pills or hash, then head up to Tower Records. There were clear differences between these experiences of loneliness, however. In Berlin, later in life, after years of sobriety, I could still feel that keen pang of wanting to belong as I drifted along, but instead of dulled and blurred, objects and people became distinct, vivid, even in their distance. I felt as if I was seeing the city—the lights, the cars, the people using small spoons to make tight circles in their espresso cups. It appeared to me with sudden acuity, as if everything was a vehicle for meaningfulness not despite but because of its ordinariness.

Once, just past 1 AM on a brisk night at the end of March, I sat in a fairly empty subway train barreling through the heart of Berlin. There were small pockets of people, but mostly, here and there, solo riders such as myself. I looked to my left and saw a nattily dressed businessman asleep, his left eye half-open and lolling up and down. The light on the roof of the car flickered and I turned toward a young woman wearing combat boots, her face covered in piercings, talking to a small brown dog at her feet.

“Blumen, Blumen,” she was saying to the terrier mix, the word for “flowers,” as she dipped her head and stroked the animal’s chin. For a moment, I imagined calling out women’s names, one after another, until she turned her head in acknowledgment. At a stop in Kreuzberg, the more bohemian part of the city, I got off and passed a ground-floor apartment with its wide window opened onto the street. On a table inside sat lemons sitting in a bowl full of water and wafts of cigarette smoke drifting into the folds of the curtains. A few blocks on, in an American-style diner, sat two gray-haired women eating toast and jam, a neon sign trembling above them.

I had no specific place to go, so I just kept walking, and looking. It was while walking the streets of that same city that Walter Benjamin arrived at the conclusion: “Solitude appeared to me as the only fit state of man.” Berlin, Boston, Columbus, London, Buffalo, Cuernavaca, New York, Singapore: I think of all the cities I have walked deep into the night, all by myself. At night, in the corners, there’s the same thrum of loneliness. Perhaps it isn’t that urban spaces, when empty, create a feeling of palpable absence, but rather, when they are empty, we can catch the hum of the feelings of abandonment and isolation that crisscross like power lines below the paved surfaces and concrete.

In the mid-1970s, Robert Weiss, a sociologist then on the faculty of Harvard’s Medical School, posited that there are six key social needs that, if unmet, in part or altogether, can lead to feelings of loneliness. They are attachment; nurturance; a sense of ongoing, dependable relationships; counsel in intense, emotional situations; and a reassurance of one’s value or worth. If we combine what Benjamin and Weiss have said, perhaps the key to navigating loneliness is to look at spaces, and people, the way an artist does—not as beautiful, but as rewarding attention with significance. The path to that feeling of a sense of worth can come from this: being the one who sees the everyday meaningfulness in that which is perpetually overlooked due to the intensity and buzz of life in a city, no matter its size.

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About the Author

Richard Deming's first collection of poems, LET'S NOT CALL IT CONSEQUENCE (Shearsman Books, 2008), won the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. He is also the author of Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading. In 2012, he was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. He is currently Director of Creative Writing at Yale University.

Visit Richard at his website: https://www.richarddemingbooks.com/

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