More Likely Than Loneliness. . . .

Originally Posted Thursday, October 10, 2013

I am not an Annie Proulx reader.  I've tried, but nothing about her prose has ever captured me.  It is O.K. for me to say so.  She is not a big fan of my blog, either.  Today I came across an article she wrote about Edward Hopper (link).  It was brief enough to read in its entirety.  Here is how it begins.

Torrents of words and phrases fall on Edward Hopper's paintings. Deadly silence, erotic despair, haunting ambiguity, irony, symbolic decoding, metaphysical, mysterious. Almost every critic, artist, writer (especially writers), art savant, book-jacket designer or media hack sees in his mature paintings solitude, alienation, loneliness and psychological tension. The general critical observation that Hopper's paintings depicted loneliness - and that this loneliness was an integral part of the American character - is a bit puzzling. Hopper himself didn't see it and once commented: "The loneliness thing is overdone." More likely than "loneliness" is the sense of self as different and apart, feelings not limited to Americans.

I know she is arguing here, but I can't tell with whom or what. Indeed, she never seems to address the issue clearly again.  Rather she reports on the relationship between Hopper and his wife who she feels compelled to describe as a forty-one-year-old virgin.  Perhaps this is her support for the differentiation between "loneliness" and "sense of self as different and apart."  It is as close as she gets in the article.  She sets herself apart from the book-jacket designers and the media hacks, I guess. 

But I am stupid.  Why do I take it personally? 

The holidays are coming.  I am almost unaware.  They could slip by me so quickly that I might not even notice.  I must slow down and pay attention.  It is a good time of year.  As sleep makes me rich, leisure makes me wise.  I will seek the wisdom of leisure in the coming weeks and months.  Yes. . . soon.  But there is much that demands my attention today and there will be no leisure or only what I have had this morning over coffee and my pitiful blog complaint.  But surely. . . soon. . . etc.