Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Loneliness")
December 10-16, 2023 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Loneliness”
Happy Hanukkah to My Jewish Friends!
We lit the candles on our menorah the first two nights of Hanukkah and will continue to do so for the next six nights. I’m not an M.O.T (Member of the Tribe) myself, but I love the Festival of Lights tradition, and continue to marvel over how this ancient practice has continued over the ages.
Opening Line of the Week
The opening lines of many works of fiction read as if they were passages from a textbook of psychology or a self-help book—and that is the case here. In Jaffe’s short story, the narrator explains why people are so reluctant to admit they are lonely:
“I guess that’s because it’s the one weakness we all secretly feel should be the easiest to overcome, and we secretly feel guilty that we can’t.”
For nearly 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com. And if you’d like to receive a daily dose of outstanding openers, follow me on Facebook.
This Week’s Puzzler
On Dec. 14, 1953, this woman died at age 57 in St. Augustine, Florida. At her death, she was best known as the author of The Yearling (1938), an endearing story about Jody Baxter, a backwoods Florida boy who adopts a young fawn.
The Yearling became the bestselling American novel of 1938, topping the New York Times bestseller list for twenty-three consecutive weeks. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year, it was adapted into a popular 1946 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman as the boy’s parents.
After a nationwide search, Claude Jarman, Jr., an unknown fifth-grader from Nashville, Tennessee was cast as Jody. At the Oscar ceremonies later in the year, he received a special Academy Award as the Outstanding Child Actor of 1946 (the last I heard, Jarman was still living—at age 89—in Nashville).
In 1928, this week’s Mystery Woman was a 32-year-old journalist when she and her husband used an inheritance from her mother to purchase a 72-acre orange grove near a central Florida hamlet named Cross Creek. At first, she had trouble adjusting to the severe living conditions (heat, mosquitos, snakes, alligators, poison ivy) and the unfamiliar—even strange—customs of her new neighbors, who she referred to as “Florida crackers.”
She soon adjusted to both, however, and began to write about them in letters to her friend Maxwell Perkins, the New York editor of such legendary writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Perkins encouraged her to turn her letters into novels and short stories—and that is exactly what she did. Of the many works of fiction she would go on to write, The Yearling was the most famous.
In 1942, she also came out with a popular memoir, Cross Creek. The book was widely praised, and had such an enduring popularity that, more than four decades later, it was adapted into a 1983 film, starring Mary Steenburgen.
In her novels and short stories, she offered quotable observations on countless topics, including this thought:
Who is this person? (Answer below)
Can You Provide Some Comfort to a Lonely Person?
If your experience has been anything like Thomas Wolfe’s—or mine, to be honest—you can surely recall periods of intense loneliness from earlier in your life. And if you’re like most people, there’s a good chance that loneliness will be showing up again at some point in your future.
I’m fortunate that I’ve been able to keep loneliness at bay for over three decades, and I’ve done so because I met a wonderful woman in 1989, and married her in 1991. More than anything—and that includes my lifelong passion for books and reading—my wife Katherine is the reason I haven’t experience loneliness in all these years. But if, for some reason, she were not in my life, loneliness would almost certainly be paying a return visit, and possibly even settling in as an unwelcome guest.
As we approach the problem of loneliness, it is helpful to distinguish loneliness from solitude, and nobody has done that better than the theologian Paul Tillich, who offered the following thought in The Eternal Now (1963):
For every person who is able to experience the glory of being alone, there are countless others who feel trapped in a deep and dark loneliness. People of any age can experience loneliness, of course, but it is especially common among senior citizens. And during a festive time like this, the celebratory nature of the season often make things worse. In a 1963 novel And Presumed Dead, Lucille Fletcher wrote:
“On a holiday lonely persons feel their loneliness more keenly.”
For centuries, loneliness has been considered a bane of human existence, but it has rarely been described as a major health risk. That changed dramatically in May of this year when Dr. Vivek Murthy, the U. S. Surgeon General, released an 81-page report declaring loneliness a public health menace. One key finding of the report was that loneliness increased the risk of premature death by nearly thirty percent—and this was followed by the startling claim that loneliness poses a health risk as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.
The Surgeon General’s report went on to add that technology has only exacerbated the problem, with one study finding that people who used social media for more than two hours a day were more than twice as likely to report feelings of loneliness than those who used social media for less than thirty minutes a day or not at all. In remarks to the press after releasing the report, Dr. Murthy said “There’s really no substitute for in-person interaction.”
The inability to make a meaningful human connection when one is desperately desired is at the heart of all forms of loneliness—and it is especially troublesome for one particular segment of the population.
It takes only one person to comfort another human being who is struggling with loneliness, and I’m hoping that during this Holiday Season, one of those people will be you. And as you’re reading this, it’s possible you’re already thinking of a particular someone. If someone doesn’t immediately come to mind, though, simply pose the following question to a friend, neighbor, community leader, or member of the clergy: “Can you think of anyone who is currently feeling especially lonely?”
After you’ve identified some people, the ball is in your court, and please don’t hesitate to drop me a note with the results of your outreach efforts. Before you do anything, though, take a few moments to peruse this week’s selection of quotations on the topic:
Loneliness comes about when I am alone without being able…to keep myself company. — Hannah Arendt
People who lead a lonely existence always have something on their minds that they are eager to talk about. — Anton Chekhov
The eternal quest of the individual human being is to shatter his loneliness. — Norman Cousins
We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love. — Dorothy Day
A person can be lonely even if he is loved by many people, because he is still not the “One and Only” to anyone. — Anne Frank
No one should ever be afraid alone. It is the worst form of loneliness and the most corrosive. — Marion Hilliard
Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself. — Carl Jung
Loneliness is not simply a matter of being alone. Loneliness is the feeling that nobody else truly cares what happens to you. — Sister Pascalina
Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty. — Mother Teresa
Alone is a fact, a condition where no one else is around. Lonely is how you feel about that. — Twyla Tharp
For source information on these quotations, and many other quotations on the topic of LONELINESS, go to Dr. Mardy's Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations.
Cartoon of the Week
Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953)
After her death, Rawlings bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida (Gainesville), where she taught creative writing. Her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service.
Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week
Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “The Benefits of Failure.”
Mardy Grothe
To view all of my Substack posts online, go here.
My Two Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com
Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note
A thoughtful newsletter, as always. And thought-provoking.
One caution. You cited the Surgeon General's report, noting its claims that loneliness increases the risk of premature death by nearly thirty percent, posing a health risk as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. That made me curious, and I read the report. It does indeed make those claims.
But there is no scientific evidence to support those claims. There is some evidence, but it is weak evidence derived solely from statistical analysis of survey results. That kind of evidence is unreliable, and any claims based on it should be taken as opinion rather than fact. Only rigorous analysis called "causal inference" can turn statistics into scientific evidence, and that kind of analysis is impractical here.
Mark Twain captured well the danger of relying on statistics when he said in Chapters from My Autobiography (chapter 20, published in the North American Review on July 5, 1907 at page 471): "Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" {Benjamin Disraeli never said anything like this in any known writing.]
Politicians like our Surgeon General love to use statistical associations to beguile us and "prove" their points. Nikki Haley did this in the recent Republican debate. She said that "for every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that." If you track down that "fact" you find it to be fiction. It comes from a statistical analysis by an Australian named Anthony Goldbloom that is pure bunkum.
Loneliness is a problem, but we do not know how much it affects our public health. There is no way to know. We can only guess, and when we do we should be careful to warn that we are only guessing instead of presenting our guesses as fact.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy does not do that. His report says: "Loneliness and social isolation increase the risk for premature death by 26% and 29% respectively. More broadly, lacking social connection can increase the risk for premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day." To me, those figures are deceptive, seeming to indicate precision when they are based on data that is not precise at all.
Not quite the same thing, but when I was 12 years old, I read a "filler" in the Lubbock Avalance Journal newspaper that has guided me ever since: "Live your life so that when you're all alone you're in good company." Anonymous