From the January 2009 issue of The Believer (props to my girl MWine for sending this to me) is a fascinating interview with political philospher Tom Dumm here where the concept of loneliness (as a symptom as well as a sort of solace) is discussed. I haven’t read his new book Loneliness as a Way of Life, and I’m not sure I could stomach an entire treatise on the issue. And yet. Every intellectual, and most artists, have grappled with the necessity of solitude and how to cultivate balance between alone time to create and social time to inspire creation. Thinking of the more aggressively isolated artists, ranging from Van Gogh to Bukowski (Melville, O’Connor and, of course, Poe, come immediately to mind as some of our more infamous American loners), it could be argued that learning how to live (thrive?) while alone much of the time is both cause and effect, an instinct for survival tempered by the imperative to connect.
BLVR: You mention that loneliness drives us to dead ends in love and life. Can thinking through our relationship to a fundamental loneliness really help us shed light on how to avoid such dead ends?
TD: One can hope. None of us is perfect, but the point of our writing is to try to become better, to learn something that we may not have already realized, about ourselves, about the world we inhabit. Maybe we won’t avoid dead ends, but will better know when we have reached them. In one of my favorite anecdotes about Foucault, someone asks him why he writes books. He responds by saying something like “When I begin to write a book, I do not know how it will come out, what it will say in the end. If I already did, I wouldn’t need to write it.” I try to take that idea to heart. Writing and thinking are, for me, the same, so if we transpose that idea, the conceit here is that I have been trying to think through my own loneliness so as to provide a guide, imperfect as it may be, to others who may have concerns about themselves, about our polity, about our way of being in the world. Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life. What I mean is: bring yourself to this book, don’t dismiss it too soon, try to bring your best self to thinking with me as I go along.… It is also an admonition to myself when I am reading other people’s books. Writing a book is very difficult to do, even a bad one. I try to remember that when reading someone else’s work.
Listen:
When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.
Who are you?
That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.
You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.
So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone.
Thoreau was quite correct about quiet desperation and the long shadow it can cast over us all, but you don’t want to run off to your own unseen island. For one thing, there are no islands anymore, except the ones you pay admission to enter; plus, it’s already been done; and above all, when Thoreau got lonely or hungry he walked home and had his mother cook dinner for him, a fact he forgot to mention in his quite convincing case for individuality. Besides, everyone is already on his or her own island. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got. *
