Loneliness, Creativity, and Empathy

This post is a review of This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity. By Richard Deming. Viking. 336 pp. $29.

To alleviate the emptiness and pain of loneliness, Richard Deming wandered through the streets of Boston, with a flask of Jack Daniels under his coat, asking strangers the time, not to start a conversation, but to prove, “at least provisionally,” that he did exist. At home, he dialed the phone, again and again, asking for “Paul,” and then drank himself into oblivion when he was told what he already knew: no one named Paul lived there.

Vector Graphic/Pixabay

The pattern was clear: a need for connection; retreat from a world in which no one seemed interested in him; drug abuse and blackout drinking. Since he has been sober, Deming has tried to understand an emotional disorder which, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, has reached epidemic proportions.

In This Exquisite Loneliness, Deming, the director of Creative Writing at Yale University, draws on his life experiences, and those of six seminal artists and thinkers who wrestled with loneliness (along with family trauma, racism, sexism, and antisemitism) — psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, anthropologist and writer Zora Neale Hurston, philosopher Walter Benjamin, photographer Walker Evans, painter Egon Schiele, and Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone — to identify the fundamental ambivalence inherent in the affliction: a desire for connection tethered to a belief in the certainty of rejection.

Throughout the book, Deming examines how heightened awareness can help loners turn outward, observe the lives of others, recognize the loneliness they feel, realize its ubiquity, empathize with them, and themselves. This Exquisite Loneliness is a beautifully written, informative, intimate, and insightful meditation about working with loneliness, a central and intrinsic feature of human existence, and not through it.

Klein, Deming reminds us, maintained that the seeds of loneliness emerge in early infancy, with a struggle between attachment and separation, and the memory of being a unified whole, “an illusion we chase for the rest of our lives.” Family relationships, Deming adds, can contribute to loneliness, but “we can’t necessarily say” it’s a cause or a cure. The self that emerges out of loneliness, moreover, is “who we are.”

Hurston’s stories, Deming acknowledges, don’t depict the vanquishing of loneliness by force of will. But their “cosmically personal yet turbulent beauty” gives readers a sense of what living with loneliness entails and provides the means for them to become “part of a larger whole, and a wider community.” If loneliness “is a story we tell ourselves,” revising that narrative invites us to create new ones.

Even before the Nazis came to power, Walter Benjamin was often “lonely, despondent, forsaken.” Avoiding cafes, Benjamin preferred communicating with friends in letters, because they permitted him to disavow isolation while remaining “distant, apart, isolated.” Divorced, on the run to escape death in a concentration camp, Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in Spain. But, Deming points out, in the essays later published as Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Benjamin demonstrated that “memory can be more than nostalgia,” by serving as a reminder that “loneliness ebbs and flows.”

Photography, Deming maintains, allowed Walker Evans, whose empathy arose from his own loneliness and need for intimacy, to remain invisible while seeing soulmates who were also invisible. “Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop,” Evans recommended. “Die knowing something. You are not here long.” Evans’ now iconic Depression-era portraits, Deming writes, allow us to “feel alone together,” and be less subject to the gravitational force of loneliness. Somewhat similarly, the paintings of Egon Schiele, whose melancholy betrayed “a lonely vulnerability,” reveal “a genius for reading the pain of others,” and seemed to say, “I am here, and you are there. That’s what we share.” Perhaps, Deming writes, that is “where we begin.”

In “Where Is Everybody?”, the first episode of The Twilight Zone, the main character, dressed in a flight suit, wanders into a midwestern town and discovers that all the inhabitants have vanished. “Help me! Help me!” Mike cries, “Please, somebody’s looking at me.” And, indeed, an assembled audience and an audience in front of TV screens, is watching him. Later, the narrator will identify “the hunger for companionship” as a basic need, “the barrier to loneliness.” That barrier “can propel us to seek out others.” Especially when we recognize, along with Deming, that “belonging” is so close to “be longing.”