This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

In these inspired meditations, Deming (Art of the Ordinary), a poet and the director of creative writing at Yale University, ruminates on how loneliness influences creativity. “I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it,” he writes, exploring how photographer Walker Evans, novelist Zora Neale Hurston, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, painter Egon Schiele, and Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling “forged insights and perspectives in the cold fires of loneliness.” Klein drew from her grief over the childhood deaths of her sister and brother when she theorized in “On the Sense of Loneliness,” an essay written in her final years, that the feeling is an escapable constant throughout life sometimes made more acute by the early loss of a parent or sibling. Deming’s penetrating analysis illustrates how artists’ personal lives inform their art, as when he suggests Serling, who struggled with feelings of isolation after moving to Hollywood, made television out of a desire to forge connections with viewers and help them, and himself, feel less alone. The lucid prose is matched by the depth of insight: “Art in general felt, feels, to me like evidence of other people’s searching for their own meaningfulness, as if they were calling over from their own lost valleys.” Profound and often achingly beautiful, this makes for great company. (Oct.)