Loneliness As a Way of Life

Loneliness as a Way of Life Loneliness as a Way of Life THOMAS DUMM HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2008 Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America A Caravan book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dumm, Thomas L. Loneliness as a way of life / Thomas Dumm. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-674-03113-5 (alk. paper) 1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Loneliness. 3. Grief. I. Title. JA66.D84 2008 320.01—dc22 2008006567 To William E. Connolly Contents Preface ix Prologue: Cordelia’s Calculus 1 Chapter I. Being 21 Chapter II. Having 51 Chapter III. Loving 91 Chapter IV. Grieving 127 Epilogue: Writing 171 Notes 181 Index 187 Preface Why would someone who has devoted so much of his adult life to the study of politics write a book about loneliness? Isn’t it a radical departure from the concerns of polity to focus on a subject that on the face of it has nothing to do with our political condition? Does it even matter for our politics whether we are lonely? I believe that it matters profoundly. Loneliness as a Way of Life is the result of a lengthy and sometimes convoluted intellectual and emotional journey, but the core intuition that has persistently in- formed the thinking and the writing of this book is that many of our most important understandings about the shape of our present communal existence—the division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the es- tranged and isolating forms that our relationships with our most intimate acquaintances sometimes assume, the weakness of our at- tachments to each other and hence to our lives in common—are all manifestations of the loneliness that has permeated the modern world. We are the inheritors of a legacy of loneliness. But loneliness is not something that can easily be described through the usual ways of doing political theory. As I worked on this book, it gradually be- came clear to me that the subject of loneliness, because of its isolating qualities—what I call “the experience of the pathos of disappearance”—is resistant to understanding by means of the or- dinary tools of description, critique, and analysis. Instead, I realized that I would need to supplement those tools in order to explore and x Preface understand the powerful in fl u ence that loneliness has on modern life. So as this book unfolds, its tone and substance become increas- ingly personal. In retrospect, it appears that I may have written something akin to a mystery story, one that concerns itself not only with the emergence of a modern form of loneliness, but with its ongoing presence as a common experience in our time. To illumi- nate this presence, in the end I had no recourse other than to supplement my study of the loneliness of others with an ongoing study of my own lonely self. You who read this book will need to judge whether it meets a particular test, whether the way I have described loneliness rings true. But the terms and conditions of your assessment will require a different set of criteria than is usual for books that take on such a subject. I ask that you try to bring as much of yourself to this book in response to what I have tried to bring to it. Descend to meet me, if you will. I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for awarding me a fellowship for the 2001–2002 academic year. That fellowship, supplemented by the generous support of the Board of Trustees at Amherst College in the form of sabbatical support for two leaves and a senior faculty research award, enabled me to take the time to think through this proj ect and to rethink and rewrite it as experience and circumstance demanded. Collegial encouragement in the form of invitations to speak on the subject of loneliness also helped me think through this proj ect. At Penn State University, Johns Hopkins University, Connecticut College, Bard College, and Simon’s Rock of Bard College, I was treated with generosity and kindness. I thank Nancy Love, William Connolly, Jane Bennett, Jennifer Culbert, Richard Flathman, Da- vid Kyuman Kim, Julie Rifkin, Thomas Keenan, Ann Lauterbach, Norton Batkin, and Asma Abbas for their hospitality on these occa- Preface xi sions. Russell Goodman invited me to Santa Fe to teach at the Na- tional Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on “Em- erson at 200” in the summer of 2003. Russell and Stephen Affeldt, the assistant director of the proj ect, enabled me to think through a series of issues concerning Emerson, individuality, and loneliness. On all these occasions, the members of the audience were remark- ably attentive and engaged by what I had to say. To the extent that any of you whom I met during these encounters hear your own voice in this book, please take it as a hopeful sign that I heeded your words and learned from them. I am thankful for your small mercies. I am also grateful for the continued support of friends and colleagues over the period of the writing of this book. In Amherst town, Julian Olf, a writer friend who is also a professor of theater at the University of Massachusetts, read my musing on Lear at an important moment. Another dear friend, Jennifer Michelson, read much of the penultimate draft of this book and offered the perspec- tive of an acutely intuitive nonacademic thinker. More generally, the denizens of Rao’s Coffee shared the ev eryday with me as I wrote in their presence. Among other good friends, Heidi Stemple read the manuscript in full, offering trenchant editorial advice with the practiced eye of a professional writer. I also wish to thank my Amherst College colleagues Kim Townsend, Nasser Hussain, and Austin Sarat for their ongoing en- gagement with my work. My colleagues at the Massachusetts Re- view have been patient with me as I neglected my duties there to fi n ish this proj ect, but they also have done more, publishing a small piece of it. Let David Lensen stand for all in my acknowledgment of their aid. Chip Turner, Wendy Brown, Mort Schoolman, Ken- nan Ferguson, Andrew Norris, Lisa Disch, Kitty Holland, Anne Norton, Jane Bennett, Peter Rush, Cornel West, Alison Young, Bob Gooding-Williams, Larry George, Elizabeth Young, Carolin Em- cke, Ted Lowi, Michael Shapiro, Linda Garman, Bill Chaloupka, xii Preface Alex Hooke, and Ted Plimpton all may fi nd some of their alienated thoughts returning to them here. This is the fi rst book I have worked on with Lindsay Waters of Harvard University Press. Lindsay insisted that I fi nd my own voice, and as a result the book is now both shorter and more direct, much better than it was when it fi rst came to him. He also suggested the title at a key moment, leading me to fi nally and fully realize that this is in fact the subject of the book—a way of life. My brother John Dumm, my sister Catherine Doherty, and my daughter Irene Bright-Dumm read much of the manuscript of this book and shared their own perceptive knowledge about the familial circumstances that are the subject of some of its contents. I am profoundly grateful to them. There are three friends of long standing whose presence I always fi nd when I write. Ann Lauterbach’s amazing poetry has inspired my less successful prose. Her passionate commitment to language— its way of expressing our states of being and becoming—continu- ally instructs me in the heartening economy of metaphor. Stanley Cavell’s impact on my understanding of philosophical matters should be readily apparent to anyone who has read his work. My wonder about where his words end and mine begin might be la- beled the anxiety of in fl u ence, except that I feel less anxious and more happy when he is present in my present. That he allows me to be his friend is a source of deep gratitude. Finally, Bill Connolly, my interlocutor for de cades now, has done more to encourage me than I deserve. I dedicate this book to him as a small acknowledgment of his many kindnesses over the years. Elements of several of the chapters of this book have appeared in other forms in previous publications, and I am grateful to the pub- lishers for their permission to reuse this material. Parts of the Pro- logue appeared as “Cordelia’s Calculus: Love and Loneliness in Preface xiii Cavell’s Reading of Lear,” in The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 212–235. The several pages of Chapter 2 that address the identity of Pip and Ishmael appeared in the September 2005 issue of the Massachusetts Review as “Who Is Ishmael?” Finally, the discussion of Du Bois and Emerson in Chap- ter 4 appeared in another form as “Political Theory for Losers” in Vocations in Political Theory, ed. Jason Frank and John Tambernino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 145–165. Prologue Cordelia’s Calculus Her father the King has just announced that he is abdicating. Her sisters have avidly praised the old man, swearing their love in abso- lute terms in order to get their shares of his estate.

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