This exquisite loneliness : what loners, outcasts, and the misunderstood can teach us about creativity
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references.

Examining the life and work of six brilliant minds of the twentieth century, THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS is a singular meditation on the ways loneliness pervades the human condition, intent on answering the question "What can be done not despite, but because of loneliness?"At an unprecedented rate, loneliness is moving across the globe--from self-isolating technology and political division to community decay and social fragmentation-and yet it's not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. Richard Deming contends that to see loneliness this way is to misunderstand it.In THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS, Deming turns an eye towards that unwelcome feeling, both in his own life and art, and those of six groundbreaking figures. Within Melanie Klein's contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston's literature, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans' photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele's avant-garde paintings, and Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, Deming finds a common thread: loneliness served as fuel for an intense creative desire that forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century. Therein lies the hope that we might yet learn how to transform the pain of emotional isolation and become both more connected to others and more at home with our often unquiet selves.