Showing posts tagged loneliness
A light, damaged and bruised Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith. What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence. “Someday the meek might actually want it,” he said. — from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Photo: Thank you, inkebook.)

A light, damaged and bruised

Corrigan told me once that Christ was quite easy to understand. He went where He was supposed to go. He stayed where He was needed. He took little or nothing along, a pair of sandals, a bit of a shirt, a few odds and ends to stave off the loneliness. He never rejected the world. If He had rejected it, He would have been rejecting mystery. And if He rejected mystery, He would have been rejecting faith.

What Corrigan wanted was a fully believable God, one you could find in the grime of the everyday. The comfort he got from the hard, cold truth—the filth, the war, the poverty—was that life could be capable of small beauties. He wasn’t interested in the glorious tales of the afterlife or the notions of a honey-soaked heaven. To him that was a dressing room for hell. Rather he consoled himself with the fact that, in the real world, when he looked closely into the darkness he might find the presence of a light, damaged and bruised, but a little light all the same. He wanted, quite simply, for the world to be a better place, and he was in the habit of hoping for it. Out of that came some sort of triumph that went beyond theological proof, a cause for optimism against all the evidence.

“Someday the meek might actually want it,” he said.

— from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

(Photo: Thank you, inkebook.)

Loneliness drifting No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final. — from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Photo: Thank you, verapb.)

Loneliness drifting

No shame in saying that I felt a loneliness drifting through me. Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final.

— from Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

(Photo: Thank you, verapb.)

(Reblogged from verapb)

Geoff Dyer on Chet Baker: “How easy, how addictive”

He was a man who seemed always to be leaving. You’d arrange to meet and he’d show up three or four hours late, or not at all, or he’d disappear for days, weeks at a time and leave no number or explanation. And the surprising thing was how easy, how addictive it was to love a man like that, how you felt a sense of abandonment that was akin to companionship—so close did he bring you to the loneliness that everyone carries around them, the loneliness you glimpse in the imploring faces of strangers on a half-empty subway. Even after they had made love and he slipped from her, even then, minutes after coming, she felt herself losing him. When some men made love to you your body bore the imprint of passion like a child growing in your womb. They could be gone for a year and still your body felt full of them, full of their love. Chet left you feeling empty, full of longing for him, full of hope that next time, next time …  And by the time you realized he could never give you what you wanted he was the only thing you wanted. She felt tears nettling her eyes and thought back to something a friend of Chet’s had once said to her about his playing, that the way he held notes made you think of that moment just before a woman cries, when her face becomes brimful of beauty as water in a glass and you would do anything in the world not to have hurt her the way you have. Her face like something so calm, so perfect, you know it can’t last but that moment, more than any other, has something of the quality of eternity about it: when her eyes hold the history of everything men and women have ever said to each other. And then you say to her ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry,’ knowing those words, more than any others in the world, will make her weep …

— from But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz

Love ends their long loneliness She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken, it was gone. She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but fascinated. He would question  her for hours about her childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception gentle. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. — from Contact, Chapter 9 (“The Numinous”), by Carl Sagan (Thank you, imgur, for the photograph of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.)

Love ends their long loneliness

She was sometimes amazed at what she was able to do and say in his presence, because of their love. She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. With Ken, it was gone.

She was comfortable describing to him her reveries, snatches of memories, childhood embarrassments. And he was not merely interested but fascinated. He would question  her for hours about her childhood. His questions were always direct, sometimes probing, but without exception gentle. She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness.

— from Contact, Chapter 9 (“The Numinous”), by Carl Sagan

(Thank you, imgur, for the photograph of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan.)

Carl Jung on loneliness and mystery

… As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. The loneliness began with the experiences of my early dreams, and reached its climax at the time I was working on the unconscious. If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.

It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.

— from “Retrospect,” in Memories, Dreams, Reflections

When a rough man bears blossoms Add to [these financial difficulties] the peculiar torture of loneliness. I say loneliness, and not solitude; I mean the loneliness a painter has to bear who in some unfrequented region is regarded by everyone as a lunatic, a murderer, a tramp. This may be a slight misery, but it is a sorrow none the less—a feeling of being outcast, particularly strange and unpleasant, though the country ever be so stimulating and beautiful. What you wrote me about the painter Serret greatly interests me. Such a man, who finally produced something with pathos, as the blossom of a hard and a difficult life, is a wonder, like the black hawthorn, or, better still, the crooked old apple trunk that at a certain moment bears blossoms which are among the most delicate and most virginal things under the sun. When a rough man bears blossoms like a flowering plant—yes, that is beautiful to see, but before that time he has had to stand a great deal of winter cold, more than those who afterwards sympathize with him can know. The artist’s life, and what an artist is, that is very curious. How deep it is—how infinitely deep! — Vincent van Gogh, from Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh (edited by Irving Stone with Jean Stone) (Photograph by dabacahin.)

When a rough man bears blossoms

Add to [these financial difficulties] the peculiar torture of loneliness. I say loneliness, and not solitude; I mean the loneliness a painter has to bear who in some unfrequented region is regarded by everyone as a lunatic, a murderer, a tramp. This may be a slight misery, but it is a sorrow none the less—a feeling of being outcast, particularly strange and unpleasant, though the country ever be so stimulating and beautiful.

What you wrote me about the painter Serret greatly interests me. Such a man, who finally produced something with pathos, as the blossom of a hard and a difficult life, is a wonder, like the black hawthorn, or, better still, the crooked old apple trunk that at a certain moment bears blossoms which are among the most delicate and most virginal things under the sun.

When a rough man bears blossoms like a flowering plant—yes, that is beautiful to see, but before that time he has had to stand a great deal of winter cold, more than those who afterwards sympathize with him can know. The artist’s life, and what an artist is, that is very curious. How deep it is—how infinitely deep!

— Vincent van Gogh, from Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh (edited by Irving Stone with Jean Stone)

(Photograph by dabacahin.)

Toni Morrison: “The hurt of the hurt world”

… Back beyond 124 was a narrow field that stopped itself at a wood. On the yonder side of these woods, a stream. In these woods, between the field and the stream, hidden by post oaks, five boxwood bushes, planted in a ring, had started stretching toward each other four feet off the ground to form a round, empty room seven feet high, its walls fifty inches of murmuring leaves.

Bent low, Denver could crawl into this room, and once there she could stand all the way up in emerald light.

It began as a little girl’s houseplay, but as her desires changed, so did the play. Quiet, primate and completely secret except for the noisome cologne signal that thrilled the rabbits before it confused them. First a playroom (where the silence was softer), then a refuge (from her brothers’ fright), soon the place became the point. In that bower, closed off from the hurt of the hurt world, Denver’s imagination produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out. Wore her out. Veiled and protected by the live green walls, she felt ripe and clear, salvation was as easy as a wish.

— from Beloved

“
There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind—wrapped tight like skin. Then there is the loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.
Toni Morrison, Beloved

It could be Wilder

Beady eyes, pointy nose, curly hair, prickly humor—the genius of Gene Wilder. Last week, I found this YouTube clip from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (based on the Roald Dahl classic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). I like the Lou Rawls version, even the Maroon 5 cover. Heck, I was moved when this was sung on Glee at the funeral of Sue Sylvester’s sister. But since I rediscovered Wilder’s “Pure Imagination,” I’ve been clicking the replay button again and again. The pleasure of watching Wilder is addictive, like the calorie overload of sweets and choco-charmers that Mr. Wonka has concocted. There’s slapstick with sinister seduction lurking behind Wilder’s moves, the way he whips the air with his cane or plays with that boy’s hair. But there is something else. Surveying the sights, “traveling in the world of my creation,” those eyes hint at blasé appreciation. Or could it be mere exhaustion? I think it’s the loneliness of a man who can fool everyone except himself. Deep inside he knows this feast of color, sugar, and ease can’t be real. Or (in the lingo of today’s eco-friendly advocacies) it’s “not sustainable.” Perhaps I’m just imagining all this; I’ll twist and twirl anything for the blog of my creation. It could be Wilder or it could just be me. Either way, Mr. Wonka’s wiles now have me in thrall.  So here I go again.  Hold your breath. Make a wish. Count to three. Come with me .  .  .  

The slightest whiff

She’s grown up to be a very poised, witty, self-sufficient person, with maybe just the slightest whiff of the perfume of loneliness that hangs around unmarried women around age thirty. The fact is that we’re all lonely, of course. Everyone knows this, it’s almost a cliché. So yet another layer of my essential fraudulence is that I pretended to myself that my loneliness was special, that it was uniquely my fault because I was somehow especially fraudulent and hollow. It’s not special at all, we’ve all got it. In spades.

— David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon” (in Oblivion)

DFW. Hello again, my Dear Fine Wound. (Oh no, don’t get me started.)