Throwback Thursday: Isolation and Loneliness

Illustration by the author.

Since the advent of Covid lockdowns las year, we've been reading much about depression caused by isolation. This is a re-post of a piece I produced in February 2009.

"Knowing, in a deep-down sense, where you are from contributes not only to your sense of identity but to your sense of community." 

~Vance Packard, A Nation of Strangers 

Last night I picked up the current Utne to read an article called "The Lonely American." The article begins with some grave statistics, cited for you here: 

Two recent studies suggest that our society is in the midst of a dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection. In the first, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), Duke University researchers found that between 1985 and 2004 the number of people with whom the average American discussed “important matters” dropped from three to two. Even more stunning, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled: In 2004 individuals without a single confidant made up a quarter of those surveyed. Our country is now filled with them. 

The second study was the 2000 U.S. census. One of the most remarkable facts to emerge from this census is that one of four households consists of one person only. The number of one-person households has been increasing steadily since 1940, when they accounted for roughly 7 percent of households. Today, there are more people living alone than at any point in U.S. history. Placing the census data and the GSS side by side, the evidence that this country is in the midst of a major social change is overwhelming.

The article is excerpted from the book of the same name by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, whose aim appears to be to show how the American lifestyle leads to social isolation. 

 

They note that socializing is not the priority it ought to be in our culture. They cite the frenetic pace of life driven by materialistic pursuits as part of the problem. They also note that social isolation is damaging to both health and ecology, though I didn't make the full connection on this last assertion. 

 

What I found absent in the article, and hope it is not deliberately ignored in the book, was any reference to the groundbreaking work by Vance Packard on this topic, A Nation of Strangers. 

 

Olds and Schwartz may be correctly sounding alarm bells regarding isolation, but what they're seeing is the fruit of what Packard cited more than forty years ago. In his 1962 analysis, "Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time. A great many people are disturbed by the feeling that they are rootless or increasingly anonymous, that they are living in a continually changing environment where there is little sense of community."

Before citing more from Packard, though, it could be that this is simply the fruit of acidity of modernity. Existential philosophers like Camus and Sartre observed this "alienation and despair" as an isolating phenomenon which for many is the human condition in our Western world. The problem with the "existential hero" is that he can't connect, and thus claims it noble to stand alone. 

 

The reality is that we weren't created to stand alone. Families, communities, tribes, clans, associations, friends... we need them because life is hard. And we're not gods, we're mortals who have a lot of hard things to deal with from time to time.

One of the things I remember most vividly from Packard's book was that people are more mobile in our modern (Fifties/Sixties, USA) society than ever before. With the free-wheeling lifestyle glorified in books like Kerouac's On the Road, young people left their stifling rural communities in droves and went to the big city where the lights are bright on Brodadway. The critically acclaimed Midnight Cowboy (Jon Voigt, Dustin Hoffman) portrayed one pair of lost souls in this exodus. And the theme song by Nillson says it all, "Everybody's talkin' at me, I don't hear a word their saying." Seeker Joe Buck finds himself alone in a big world, and it's a hard world.

But Packard cited other causes for this rootlessness, much of it work related. In the course of my life I've been aware too that military kids and preachers' kids are often the victims of mobile lifestyles that make it challenging to develop connections. It's almost a byword now to say, rather flippantly, you have to go where the jobs are.

For more on Packard, and an interesting application of Packard's observations to the Red States / Blue States divide, check out this perspective by the Brothers Judd.

Dylan On Loneliness: References A-Plenty, Sorrows Run Deep

This week I was thinking about Eleanor Rigby and that famous line, "Ah, look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from?" This song influenced me to post Thursday about David Bowie's Space Oddity, though I was only scratching the surface on this topic. 

A 1950 bestseller, The Lonely Crowd, addressed it from another angle. It's a striking title. How can you be lonely when you're with a crowd? Is that an oxymoron? Not really. It's probably quite common, even too common.

When I turned to my Bob Dylan Concordance, I was not surprised at how many of his songs include the words lonely, lonesome and loneliness.

For example, Dylan used the word Lonely 13 times in his songs. One of my favorites, Born in Time, begins, "In the lonely night..." Time Out of Mind has a lot of moody lyrics, including this line from Can't Wait: "While I'm strolling through the lonely graveyard of my mind..." What an evocative image. Think about it. 

In I Shall Be Released he references "this lonely crowd." And Dylan uses the word thrice in his latest album, Rough & Rowdy Ways -- twice in Murder Most Foul and once in False Prophet: "I go where only the lonely can go." 

Dylan uses the word Loneliness four times, as follows:
"There are those who worship loneliness, I'm not one of them." (Dirge/Planet Waves)
"In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space..." (Every Grain of Sand/Shot of Love)
"Father of loneliness and pain..." (Father of Night/New Morning)
"Loneliness, tenderness, high society, notoriety..." (No Time to Think/Street Legal)

As if that weren't enough, the word Lonesome appears over 25 times in Dylan's songs. In 1962 he sang "I wanna leave my lonesome home." Going forward he sings about all kinds of lonesomes: Lonesome shadows, the lonesome ocean, a lonesome day, a long lonesome road, the lonesome nighttime, the lonesome sparrow that sings in Gates of Eden, a lonesome grave, a lonesome organ grinder, lonesome fear and lonesome clouds are just a few of the places where the word is an adjective expressing lament. Yes, "today has been a sad and lonesome day" he sings on Lonesome Day Blues (Love and Theft) and "lonesome comes up as down goes the day." (That latter is an especially interesting image from Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie) 

His lonesomes are not always due to longing for a lost love. In The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll it's a reference to the pathos of injustice.

* * * 

Dylan didn't originate the idea of lonesomeness. Elvis ("Are you lonesome tonight?), Hank Williams ("I'm so lonesome I could cry"), Billie Holiday ("The Lonesome Road"), and a host of others before him have testified to this feature of the human condition. 

On the other hand, there's another aspect of being alone that shouldn't be overlooked. I'm referring to the satisfaction of healthy solitude. Being comfortable with our selves in solitude is a good thing. Most artists, writers and musicians value that timeless feeling of being absorbed in one's work. 

In short, being alone does not necessitate our feeling lonely. How are you doing today?

Related Link
Bob Dylan's Dreams

Duluth Dylan Fest 2021

Space Oddity and the Quest for Connection

Photo courtesy NASA

THROWBACK THURSDAY
This past week I read an article about loneliness, which simultaneously brought to mind The Beatles' Eleanor Rigby and a book by Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier, Escape from Loneliness. This post on that particular theme was shared 11 years ago today.

Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills 

and put your helmet on 

Ground Control to Major Tom 

Commencing countdown, engines on 

Check ignition and
may God's love be with you
 
[spoken] Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Liftoff 

These opening lines from David Bowie's Space Oddity were such a radical departure from the contemporary pop of its time. Contrast this to Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones) or Build Me Up, Buttercup (Foundations). The space race was in full swing when this was being written. The title is a transparent take-off on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been continuously playing in New York for years. But the song is clearly about something else. 

 
This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare
 
You can picture the astronaut, out there alone, cut off from the world floating beneath and away from him, separated not only by space but by his strange experience, uniquely disquieting because how many people can understand or imagine what he is thinking, feeling, going through at this moment, his fears, his anxieties... and that strange comment about his fame... "the papers want to know whose shirts you wear" as he ponders the meaning of his life.

I don't always sleep well, with so much on my mind so much of the time. You have to wonder how these astronauts got any rest at all, wrapped in Mission Control outfits that can't possibly have been as comfy as being in one's underwear between sheets.

As with all great poetry, a rose is not a rose. And the capsule Major Tom is to emerge from is more than a capsule. He is leaving the security of what he knows for the uncertainty of the unknown; he is leaving the domain where he is in control. He is letting go.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do
 

Tom Wolfe's bestseller The Right Stuff is one fat book, but it's a fascinating read and a great picture of the audacity of the space program and the space cowboys who made it happen. Not everyone has what it takes.

There are many endeavors to which we are suited or ill-suited based on our personal dispositions. Career choices, if at all possible, should not only dovetail with our interests but also our personalities. Some people have to be outdoors and find office space stifling. Some are more social, and others most comfortable in solitude. Some like being active, others prefer contemplative tasks.

Wolfe made it clear that The Right Stuff is more than physical toughness. There's a mental facet involving courage, risk taking and steel nerves, among other things.

Wolfe made them out to be America's heroes, and on one level they were thus. But if you trace the aftermath of their space walks, moon walks, multiple cycles 'round the globe, you find that they were mortals, just like you and I. They struggled with the basic needs we all struggle with, how to make peace with ourselves in a world that often fails to understand us. Learning to overcome the loneliness of our isolation and find peace within our solitude.

Here's the culmination of Bowie's song.

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you....
 
Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.

Is it tragic, or beautiful? Thomas Wolfe (author of Look Homeward Angel, and not to be confused with Tom Wolfe above) once observed, "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."

Perhaps Space Oddity makes a connection because nearly all youth feel to some degree a measure of alienation, a disconnection with friends and family, partly out of fear of revealing our most vulnerable selves. When we recognize that nearly all have struggled with self-doubts, uncertainty and apprehension, then we understand we're not so alone as we imagined.

Of these things much more can be said. Have a thoughtful day. For those around you struggling with their isolation, reach out and share your ray of sunshine.

Rocketman Reveals Elton John's Audacity and the Aching Loneliness That Contributed to His Powers

Finally saw Rocketman the other night, the Elton John biopic that is part Broadway musical, part psychiatric study. The film-maker's attempt to create a movie as audacious and over-the-top as the subject himself failed for me, but my appreciation of Elton John's music remains undiminished.

The film begins in a group therapy session with a dozen people seated in chairs in a circle as you might expect to find in an AA meeting. The people are all in ordinary street clothes, and then this guy walks in wearing a bright orange outfit with horns and wings. He begins by listing all his addictions. The, using flashbacks, we learn the story of his life.

Despite my dislike of certain aspects of the film, it triggered a number of thoughts that I kept reflecting on afterwards. First, though I need to clear the air about what I did not like. The choreographed dance numbers.

When the Coen Brothers re-created these over-the-top scenes with dancers or sea-swimmers in Hail Caesar, it felt like it was intended to be a satirical re-creation of those 30's Hollywood musicals, which actually worked in films like The Wizard of Oz and Oklahoma. In this instance it felt out of place. Or maybe it's just that I dislike musicals and the problem is me. I know people who are wowed by this kind of choreography. If you like that kind of thing, I will accept that I am the odd man out. This did not kill my appreciate for the story.

That being said, the film did a fantastic job of revealing the challenges of success and that well-worn adage, "It's lonely at the top."

When the movie was over, a haunting line from Hendrix reverberated through me: "Loneliness is such a drag." Along with that came the chorus of Eleanor Rigby: "Ah look at all the lonely people." Followed by a remark that Kurt Vonnegut made to me when I said how much I liked Hesse: "You must be lonely."

* * * *

In show business people frequently assume a stage name for various reasons. I'd always assumed it was to protect their families, which is a noble motive, or to put on a more glamorous identity. Thus, Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. became John Denver and Frances Ethel Gumm became Judy Garland. For Elton John his name change emerged from an ice cold childhood that he simply felt compelled to escape, and a self-hate that bound him in chains.

In becoming Elton John, he could become anything he wanted. Elton was someone quite different from Reginald Dwight, and he would keep it that way.

Audacity
In the past I have written about audacity in show business, specifically as regards its usefulness as a marketing tool. 

The new thought I had about audacity, though, is this. It's not audacity alone that makes greatness. Instead, audacity only works when the thing you are drawing attention is golden to begin with.

What I mean here is this. Muhammed Ali recited poetry and made outrageous claims, but he delivered the goods in the ring, taking out Sonny Liston in two successive fights and become a legendary boxer. Bob Dylan likewise was audacious, but he backed it up with incomparable songwriting.

In Rocketman we early on get a glimpse of how remarkably talented young Elton John was as a pianist. Had he been an average talent who dressed in over-the-top attire show after show all those years, he would not have captured the audiences he captured in concerts. Nor would he have sold over 300 million records.

The Real Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Bernie Taupin
I first heard of Elton John in the spring of 1970. Your Song was getting air time and when I saw his album at the Farmer's Market in Bound Brook, NJ I purchased it instantly. These were the days when you absorbed liner notes, and this was the first time I saw the name Bernie Taupin. I vaguely recall someone commenting that Elton John was a homosexual and Bernie Taupin his partner, as if this were a negative against their music. "So what?" I remember thinking. The songs were great. The music was great.

As it turns out Taupin was a lyricist, and in Elton John he found the perfect vehicle for what he'd been writing. Theirs was a mutual admiration society type of thing. A gifted writer meets a gifted song-score creator who is likewise a compelling performer. Each proved to be impossibly valuable to the other. Rodgers and Hammerstein come to mind here.

"Take Me To The Pilot" and "Border Song" and "The King Must Die" on that first album I bought showed that Elton John was going to be more than a one hit wonder. The hits kept coming.

Taron Egerton as Elton.

Taron Egerton
One of the bright spots in this film had to be the acting of Taron Egerton, who played the Elton John character. He not only acted the role, he sang the songs. Many reviewers at imdb.com said Egerton deserved an Academy Award for the role, and even though he didn't grab the Oscar there, he did receive the nod at the Golden Globes for Best Performance as an Actor.

The Magic of His Music
As noted earlier, Elton John's tunes, the music with which he clothed Taupin's lyrics, we so often effective because it channeled his inner loneliness with an ethereal quality you just can't capture in words alone. Hence the power behind "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues." And again, that loneliness theme leaps out with these aching lines:

Loneliness was tough
The toughest role you ever played
Hollywood created a superstar
And pain was the price you paid

The power isn't simply the lyrics, but the haunting melody that carries these words on wings. Along with a delivery that comes from someone intimately acquainted with the emotion.

When all is said and done, it's a "big" film about a man who has been a very big star, one of many whose careers were birthed in the Sixties.

Here's something to take you away.

On Loneliness: 17 Quotes and an Anecdote

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage

I was thinking about Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier this weekend, in particular his book Escape from Loneliness which I'd once owned several decades back. Psychologists sit in the privileged position of having people from all walks of life bare their souls to them, and after a long career they have ample fodder for anecdotal material in books and articles.

Thinking about that led to my Googling the word loneliness, followed by quotes on loneliness. This blog post assembles in one batch a few of the many that you'll find if you do the same. What struck me is how many different kinds of people from various walks of life have had something to say on this topic.

And what also hit me was the quote by Kurt Vonnegut that opens this passage today. I interviewed the author once, and to build a rapport I started by stating that in college I'd read all of his books and Herman Hesse's books. He replied, "You must have been lonely." When I asked why he'd make such a comment he said something like, "Anyone who is that into Hesse must be lonely. All of Hesse's characters were lonely."

When he said that my thoughts turned inward. I managed to keep the dialogue going with Mr. Vonnegut but inwardly I wrestled with questions like, "Was I really that lonely? Was I lonelier than I'd realized?"

What I see now is that Mr. Vonnegut himself was well acquainted with this "disease of loneliness" and had I been more astute I may have been able to take a couple minutes to digress on this. Who knows what may have been unearthed?

As for our theme here, there's a difference between loneliness and solitude. I'm guessing that most writers and artists relish their times of solitude. The quotes that follow clarify and amplify what loneliness is in its essence. You can sense a lot of pain in many of these observations.

* * * *

“The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” ― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.” ― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.” ― Jean-Paul Sartre

“When you have nobody you can make a cup of tea for, when nobody needs you, that's when I think life is over.” ― Audrey Hepburn

“If one's different, one's bound to be lonely.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke” ― Vincent van Gogh

“It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.” ― David Levithan, Every Day

“Nothing makes a room feel emptier than wanting someone in it.” ― J

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed

“To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a friend.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Loneliness is about the scariest thing out there.” ― Joss Whedon

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.” ― G.K. Chesterton

“Booksellers are the most valuable destination for the lonely, given the numbers of books written because authors couldn't find anyone to talk to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

“In the midst of friends, home, and kind parents, she was alone.”
― William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair

“The worst thing about loneliness is that it brings one face to face with oneself.”
― Mary Balogh, No Man's Mistress

“I have been a stranger here in my own land: All my life” ― Sophocles, Antigone

Meantime, life goes on all around you.

Space Oddity

Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills
and put your helmet on

Ground Control to Major Tom
Commencing countdown,
engines on
Check ignition
and may God's love be with you

[spoken]
Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Liftoff

These opening lines from David Bowie's Space Oddity were such a radical departure from the contemporary pop of its time. Contrast this to Honky Tonk Women (Rolling Stones) or Build Me Up, Buttercup (Foundations). The space race was in full swing when this was being written. The title is a transparent take-off on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had been continuously playing in New York for years. But the song is clearly about something else.

This is Ground Control
to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule
if you dare

You can picture the astronaut, out there alone, cut off from the world floating beneath and away from him, separated not only by space but by his strange experience, uniquely disquieting because how many people can understand or imagine what he is thinking, feeling, going through at this moment, his fears, his anxieties... and that strange comment about his fame... "the papers want to know whose shirts you wear" as he ponders the meaning of his life.

I don't always sleep well, with so much on my mind so much of the time. You have to wonder how these astronauts got any rest at all, wrapped in Mission Control outfits that can't possibly have been as comfy as being in one's underwear between sheets.

As with all great poetry, a rose is not a rose. And the capsule Major Tom is to emerge from is more than a capsule. He is leaving the security of what he knows for the uncertainty of the unknown; he is leaving the domain where he is in control. He is letting go.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating
in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Tom Wolfe's bestseller The Right Stuff is one fat book, but it's a fascinating read and a great picture of the audacity of the space program and the space cowboys who made it happen. Not everyone has what it takes.

There are many endeavors to which we are suited or unsuited based on our personal dispositions. Career choices, if at all possible, should not only dovetail with our interests but also our personality. Some people have to be outdoors and find office space stifling. Some are more social, and others most comfortable in solitude. Some like being active, others prefer contemplative tasks.

Wolfe made it clear that The Right Stuff is more than physical toughness. There's a mental facet involving courage, risk taking and steel nerves, among other things.

Wolfe made them out to be America's heroes, and on one level they were thus. But if you trace the aftermath of their space walks, moon walks, multiple cycles 'round the globe, you find that they were mortals, just like you and I. They struggled with the basic needs we all struggle with, how to make peace with ourselves in a world that often fails to understand us. Learning to overcome the loneliness of our isolation and find peace within our solitude.

Listen to the culmination here.

Though I'm past
one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much
she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead,
there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you....

Here am I floating
round my tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do.

Is it tragic, or beautiful? Thomas Wolfe (author of Look Homeward Angel, and not to be confused with Tom Wolfe above) once observed, "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."

Perhaps Space Oddity makes a connection because nearly all youth feel to some degree a measure of disconnection with friends and family, leading them to feel themselves misfits. When we recognize that nearly all have struggled with self-doubts, uncertainty, apprehension, then we understand we're not so alone as we imagined.

Of these things much more can be said. Have a thoughtful day. For those around you struggling with their isolation, reach out and share your ray of sunshine.

The Lonely American

"Knowing, in a deep-down sense, where you are from contributes not only to your sense of identity but to your sense of community." ~Vance Packard, A Nation of Strangers

Last night I picked up the current Utne to read an article called "The Lonely American." The article begins with some grave statistics, cited for you here:

Two recent studies suggest that our society is in the midst of a dramatic and progressive slide toward disconnection. In the first, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), Duke University researchers found that between 1985 and 2004 the number of people with whom the average American discussed “important matters” dropped from three to two. Even more stunning, the number of people who said there was no one with whom they discussed important matters tripled: In 2004 individuals without a single confidant made up a quarter of those surveyed. Our country is now filled with them.

The second study was the 2000 U.S. census. One of the most remarkable facts to emerge from this census is that one of four households consists of one person only. The number of one-person households has been increasing steadily since 1940, when they accounted for roughly 7 percent of households. Today, there are more people living alone than at any point in U.S. history. Placing the census data and the GSS side by side, the evidence that this country is in the midst of a major social change is overwhelming.

The article is excerpted from the book of the same name by Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, whose aim appears to be to show how the American lifestyle leads to social isolation.

They note that socializing is not the priority it ought to be in our culture. They cite the frenetic pace of life driven by materialistic pursuits as part of the problem. They also note that social isolation is damaging to both health and ecology, though I didn't make the full connection on this last assertion.

What I found absent in the article, and hope it is not deliberately ignored in the book, was any reference to the groundbreaking work by Vance Packard on this topic, A Nation of Strangers.

Olds and Schwartz may be correctly sounding alarm bells regarding isolation, but what they're seeing is the fruit of what Packard cited more than forty years ago. In his 1962 analysis, "Personal isolation is becoming a major social fact of our time. A great many people are disturbed by the feeling that they are rootless or increasingly anonymous, that they are living in a continually changing environment where there is little sense of community."

Before citing more from Packard, though, it could be that this is simply the fruit of acidity of modernity. Existential philosophers like Camus and Sartre observed this "alienation and despair" as an isolating phenomenon which for many is the human condition in our Western world. The problem with the "existential hero" is that he can't connect, and thus claims it noble to stand alone.

The reality is that we weren't created to stand alone. Families, communities, tribes, clans, associations, friends... we need them because life is hard. And we're not gods, we're mortals who have a lot of hard things to deal with from time to time.

One of the things I remember most vividly from Packard's book was that people are more mobile in our modern (Fifties/Sixties, USA) society than ever before. With the free-wheeling lifestyle glorified in books like Kerouac's On the Road, young people left their stifling rural communities in droves and went to the big city where the lights are bright on Brodadway. The critically acclaimed Midnight Cowboy (Jon Voigt, Dustin Hoffman) portrayed one pair of lost souls in this exodus. And the theme song by Nillson says it all, "Everybody's talkin' at me, I don't hear a word their saying." Seeker Joe Buck finds himself alone in a big world, and it's a hard world.

But Packard cited other causes for this rootlessness, much of it work related. In the course of my life I've been aware too that military kids and preachers' kids are often the victims of mobile lifestyles that make it challenging to develop connections. It's almost a byword now to say, rather flippantly, you have to go where the jobs are.

For more on Packard, and an interesting application of Packard's observations to the Red States / Blue States divide, check out this perspective by the Brothers Judd.

Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

"Loneliness is the leprosy of our era." ~ Mother Teresa

I keep a scrap book of quotes from my readings. It's a useful tool for organizing pithy insights from various sources. I don't recall where this one came from, but it stuck me with enough force to record it in my book.

The observation, comparing loneliness to what is now called Hansen's disease, is quite interesting. Leprosy is not like the plague which wiped out a third to half of Europe in the first millennium. Though two to three million people have the disease worldwide, I know of no serious scientist who is concerned about a worldwide epidemic. The media is not stirring up a panic about this unfortunate malady as they have about bird flu which has now killed just over one hundred worldwide.

So the comparison to leprosy has a different meaning from just a communicable disease. One photo of a leper tells why this is. Lepers are shunned. They are ugly. They are outcasts. They're pushed outside the cheerful social exchanges that make up community.

A Google search on loneliness unveils millions of web pages on this theme. How ironic. The world has too many people, yet so many so lonely.

Many books and poems have been written on the theme. Maybe knowing that we are not the only ones who have ever felt this way is helpful. So the lonely share their painfully lovely, lonely self-expressions.

I'm reminded of Billy Joel's observation in Piano Man, "They're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone."

Whole books on the theme have been written. Perhaps some of the great music we appreciate was squeezed from a lonely heart. For sure you hear it in Tschaikovski. Certainly most creative artists reach into deep spaces of the soul to draw on something there akin to inner isolation. Maybe what makes this experience painful is when we get trapped there, unable to connect to others, and unhappy with our selves. Like the leper, we may feel ugly... unable to see our true beauty; or desperately unaffirmed, unloved and incomplete.

There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. We are all, to a lesser or greater extent, travelling a solitary path. As the old Negro spiritual puts it, "Nobody knows the trouble I seen, nobody knows my sorrow..." To the extent we are able to forget ourselves and notice those around us who also have need of being affirmed, loved, valued, appreciated, to that extent we can make this world a better place and escape the prisons we've made for ourselves within our selves.

The following is a poem I wrote describing something of what loneliness has at times meant to me.

Hitchhiking Across Antarctica

So desolate here. So desolate and cold.

You grit your teeth to keep them from chattering.
By the time this is over you'll be lucky to have any teeth at all.

If only you can stop this shivering.

Standing alone, waiting for someone to come along.

So desolate here. Unbelievably cold. It doesn't seem possible.

Is this where it's all going to end?

"What was the meaning of it all? Why am I here?" you ask yourself.

You lean forward into the fierce wind.

Oh for but one spark of human kindness to re-kindle

the cold dark embers of your heart.

You stare out across the virgin snow, fingers numb with cold

under your worn mittens. You've lost all sense of touch.

It hardly matters because there is no one there.

Your arms are so stiff with cold you can no longer reach out.

"Where is everyone? How long, oh Lord?"

You have only the load on your back,

but it is more than you can carry.

And even this you can't take with you when you go,

if it comes to that.
You keep waiting, but no one comes along.

It's a frost cold chill, this loneliness.

It's like hitchhiking across Antarctica.

Bric-A-Brac

Little things that no one needs
-- Little things to joke about --
Little landscapes, done in beads.
Little morals woven out,
Little wreaths of gilded grass,
Little brigs of whittled oak
Bottled painfully in glass;
These are made by lonely folk.

Lonely folk have lines of days
Long and faltering and thin;
Therefore -- little wax bouquets,
Prayers cut upon a pin,
Little maps of pinkish lands,
Little charts of curly seas,
Little plats of linen strands,
Little verses, such as these.

Dorothy Parker