This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity by Richard Deming Book Tour with Author Interview

 

Synopsis (from Amazon):

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.

 

Excerpted from This Exquisite Loneliness.

 

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. 

 

 

 

Praise:

“Loneliness is everywhere these days. But this book will chase some of it away, and maybe replace it with connection.” — Patton Oswalt, Emmy and Grammy winning comic

 

"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.”  — Psychology Today

 

"...Rich and sensitive...[Deming's] ability to limn loneliness and isolation, and trace the ways in which his six subjects explored them, is one that Mr. Deming comes by honestly."

—The Wall Street Journal

Interview:

On writing:

 

In THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS, you write about your own struggles with loneliness (and addiction), but you also write about a variety of figures, including Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Melanie Klein, Zora Neale Hurston, Walker Evans, Walter Benjamin, Egon Schiele, and Rod Serling.  How did you come up with that list?

I knew that I had to look beyond my own life in order to be able to see loneliness from a range of perspectives and angles. These people were incredibly influential artists, writers, and thinkers, and they also had a deep sense of loneliness that they pretty explicitly wrestled with throughout their respective lives.  Some are household names and I think readers learn to see them with a new lens. A few of the people I wrote about might be new to some readers, and that way people get to discover new stories as well. This list also shows loneliness isn’t specific to a particular age, gender, race, or nationality.  Anyone can feel lonely.  Everyone feels lonely.

 

How did you do research for your book?

It was a combination of things.  Hitting libraries—especially Yale’s Beinecke Library. I traveled, too. For instance, I went to Vienna to see the paintings and drawings of Egon Schiele, and there I also visited sites important to the early life of Melanie Klein.  I also did some interviewing of researchers and experts and scholars.

 

Which was the hardest chapter to write? The easiest?

The hardest to write was probably the one about the critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. Some of his thinking is so complex, it can be a challenge to present it to a general readership.

 

I’m not sure if it was the easiest, but the two in which I discovered the most were the one about the novelist Zora Neal Hurston and then the one about Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. Serling’s life was much more fascinating than I ever realized.  For instance, he was a decorated soldier who had been wounded in World War II, fighting in the Philippines.  Who knew?   Hurston was so attuned to her own sense of loneliness and she was so adept at retelling the early incidents of her life with such rich detail that getting to learn more about those stories was incredibly compelling.

 

In your book you make a reference to “exquisite loneliness.” Could you say more about what you mean by that? 

Different forms of loneliness have different textures, different registers, and loneliness can actually heighten one’s sense of attention to the world’s specific details. Feeling outside of things offers us a widened perspective on what surrounds us all the time. It’s an emotional awareness sharpened by the pain of feeling excluded or isolated that can provide us with new insight into who we are and how others feel. We see what we need, we see what we love, more keenly through the experience of separateness, from feeling an intense, poignant distance and being aware of its textures as it occurs. It’s like the experience of seeing a loved one standing on the platform as your train departs the station. This insight gives us opportunities to build and create, to learn and grow.

 

There are many books out there about loneliness. What makes THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS different?

Most importantly, I understand the stakes, which is why mine story is such a part of this.  When it comes to loneliness, for many people, everything is on the line.  I wanted to understand loneliness in a way that opens us up to one another. I begin with the idea that in essence loneliness is what makes us human. I weave my own struggles with loneliness together with biographical sketches of important artists, writers, and thinkers in order to approach the issue from a variety of angles, and to uncover the connections between loneliness and an artistic impulse.  I may not be able to cure it, but I can learn how it thinks, I can figure out what it thinks about, there in the dark.

 

What advice would you give budding writers?

1)       Take chances, especially emotional ones. If you want readers to connect, be ready to be as open as you want them to be.  The writing has to enact those possibilities of intimacy and vulnerability. 

2)      Write the book you yourself need to read.

 

Do you have another profession besides writing?

I teach at Yale University—creative writing and American literature. I’m also the director of creative writing.

 

How long have you been writing?

Most of my life. I started out in music but gravitated to writing at a certain point in my early twenties.

 

What genre do you write and why?

Poetry and nonfiction.  The nonfiction covers a range too—from criticism to the personal essay. I find both these genres let me pose questions to myself and then give me the room to really follow thoughts by way of language.

 

What is the last great book you’ve read?

“Great” is a heavy word! I guess I’ll say Death in the Family by James Agee, which I read for the first time a few months ago. It’s devastating, with one of the greatest opening paragraphs I know of.  For something more current, I’d also recommend an amazing new book of poems by Catherine Barnett titled Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space.

 

What is a favorite compliment you have received about THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS?

People tell me quite often that they feel seen, which does mean a lot.  I have had the experience a few times of writer friends saying they were going to read This Exquisite Loneliness simply because they were interested in what I have to say, but they themselves never feel lonely.  Then, after a few weeks I get the email: “turns out, I am lonely.” Since the book is really about getting to understand and recognize loneliness, as well as free us from the shame that so often seems to attach itself to talking about loneliness, these responses mean that I’m getting us all to have a conversation about this complex emotion.

 

What were the biggest rewards and challenges with writing your book?

The biggest rewards have been lots of great conversations and moving letters and email from people from all over. Also, in writing the book, I was able to spend a lot of time learning about the people I wrote about and getting to really dive into what made their work so profound and poignant. The biggest challenges were around getting the tone right.  I wanted it to be helpful and hopeful, but also honest and open.

 

Which authors inspire you to write?

So many!  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Paul Auster, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Claudia Rankine, Marilyn Robinson, Adam Phillips, and Susan Howe.

 

What is something you had to cut from your book that you wish you could have kept?

I get asked a lot if there were figures that I wanted to write about, but had to leave out. There definitely are.  The three that are at the top of the list are James Baldwin, David Bowie, and the contemporary Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. I did get a little of Bowie into the book and I quote Baldwin, but ultimately I had to make tough choices.

 

On rituals:

 

Do you snack while writing? Favorite snack?

Does espresso count?  I’m a big believer in the afternoon double espresso with a modest cookie or two or three.

 

 

Where do you write?

I tend to write in my study, in a chair with the laptop on my lap and piles of books swaying around me. I never write at a desk. I often have a revision session at a busy place, such as a coffee shop.

 

Do you write every day? What is your writing schedule?

I don’t write every day, though I used to teach a class at Yale called Daily Themes that asks students to do just that. As long as you have a habit and structure that works, you can stick with that.  What I do is build in specific days in the week given over entirely to writing.  Although, I should say that once I’m far enough along in a project, I can spend focused spurts of time when I grab them—waiting for a train, say.

 

Is there a specific ritualistic thing you do during your writing time?

I begin by reading something—sometimes even aloud—to get the blood flowing. It is often better to read something not like what I’m supposed to be writing, but will still get me attuned to language.

 

Fun stuff:

 

Favorite travel spot?

Vienna. I like to say it’s the only place I know that is more melancholic than I am.

 

Favorite dessert?

Chocolate, any form.

 

If you were stuck on a deserted island, which 3 books would you want with you?

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig, and Shipbuilding for Dummies.

 

What is something you've learned about yourself during the pandemic?

I’m not that good at baking.

 

What TV series are you currently binge watching?

Baby Reindeer, but isn’t everyone bingeing that one?

 

What song is currently playing on a loop in your head?

A cover of my favorite Pixies song “Where Is My Mind” by Puddles Pity Party.

 

 

What is something that made you laugh recently?

Gary Gulman and his stand-up special Born on 3^rd Base. Honest and hilarious.

 

What is your go-to breakfast item?

Oatmeal with blueberries and a teaspoon of honey.

 

What is the oldest item of clothing you own?

A T-shirt from Downbeat Magazine, circa 1990. I was a proud subscriber.

 

 Author bio:

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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