“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?" Through examining the loneliness of his subjects and own life, Deming asserts how loneliness can fuel our creativity and provide us empathy for others and ourselves.
Loneliness is not a feeling to which we readily admit. It is stigmatized, freighted with shame and fear, easy to dismiss as mere emotional neediness. Poet, art critic, and literary theorist 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 in the lives and the work of six groundbreaking figures. From Melanie Klein's contributions to psychoanalysis and the seminal literature of Zora Neale Hurston to the inventive philosophical writings of Walter Benjamin, and from Walker Evans' photography of urban alienation and Egon Scheile's avant-garde paintings to the ethical underpinnings of 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.
From the "cosmic loneliness" that permeated the life of Zora Neale Hurston to the profound detachment that dogged Rod Serling at the height of his fame, loneliness has long been a complex and slippery subject, as lush and fruitful as it is searingly painful.
