In Steve Earle’s 2011 novel I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive, which features Hank Williams’s ghost as a prominent character, he makes a distinction between being lonely and being lonesome:
Lonely’s a temporary condition, a cloud that blocks out the sun for a spell ... Lonesome’s a whole other thing. Incurable, terminal. A hole in your heart so big and so deep that no amount of money or whiskey or pussy or dope in the whole goddam world can fill it up.
I thought about that quote a lot when I was recently reading the article “Loved, yet lonely,” in which the philosopher professor Kaitlyn Creasy explores the way that “just as one can feel lonely in a room full of strangers, one can feel lonely in a room full of friends.”
Creasy, unsurprisingly given her profession, looks to philosophy, and specifically to the work of Kieran Setiya, to address this question. She summarizes Setiya’s characterization of loneliness as the “pain of social disconnection,” and illustrates this with an example of a woman who has made a long-distance move to a new place where she doesn’t know anyone:
In other words, she will tend to experience feelings of loneliness because she does not yet have friends whose love of her reflects back to her the basic value as a person that she has, friends who let her see that she matters. Only when she makes genuine friendships will she feel her unconditional value is acknowledged; only then will her basic social needs to be loved and recognised be met. Once she feels she truly matters to someone, in Setiya’s view, her loneliness will abate.
However, Creasy is interested not in this, one might say generic explanation of loneliness, but in the “painful feelings of loneliness [which occur] even though the individuals undergoing such experiences have a loving network of friends, family and colleagues who support them and recognise their unconditional value.” She asks us to “notice that the feature affirmed [by the friend in Setiya’s account] – my unconditional value – is radically depersonalised. The property the friend recognises and affirms in me is the same property she recognises and affirms in her other friendships.”
For Creasy, preventing loneliness “requires attending not just to whether my worth is affirmed, but to whether I am recognised and affirmed in my particularity and whether my particular, even idiosyncratic social needs are met by those around me.”
But what if our social needs are too particular or idiosyncratic to be met?
The title of this post is, of course, a provocation. And is not meant to imply that people who live east of the Mississippi have an easier time of it. Quite the opposite: being lonesome is, I would contend, harder to endure in the East, where we are so surrounded by others. The plains and deserts and impossibly rocky and high mountains of the West, to me, allow one to be slightly more at ease with lonesomeness, as if their very emptiness recognizes and affirms the emptiness within.
The word “lonesome” dates back to the 17th century — a relative newcomer compared to the use of “depression” to mean a sadness that literally “presses down” upon us, which has been traced back to the early 15th century. But so far as I can tell, the distinction which Earle makes between “lonely” and “lonesome” is, essentially, an exegesis of American country music.
Lonesomeness is often associated with the mythical figure of the cowboy. Although “cowboys” are often counterposed, in the popular (white) imagination, to “Indians,” they were not for the most part the agents of settler colonialism, but workers within it. The land stolen during our country’s westward expansion fed cattle, and the cowboy brought them to market, not with a longshoreman’s cargo-slinging brute strength but with his own willingness to be alone for long periods of time, to suspend or repress his social needs, while driving dumb beasts to slaughter across vast and empty spaces.
The first version of Hank Williams’ song “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” that I ever heard was the one on the Cowboy Junkies’ breakthrough album The Trinity Session. I purchased a vinyl copy in the fall of my high school junior year after reading about it in TIME during the mandatory “read the news” portion of a social studies class.
The album — quiet, slow, recorded live to a single mic in a cavernous church — was a revelation in 1988, when the charts were dominated by George Michael and INXS, Rick Astley and Guns N’ Roses, music that filled all the available sonic space with lust and swagger. After dropping the needle onto side one, the first thing you hear is singer Margot Timmins’ a cappella rendition of “Mining for Gold,” a hard rock miner’s lament about the rock dust in his lungs that will “cut down a miner when he is still young.” (“Two years and the silicosis takes hold, and I feel like I’m dying from mining for gold.”)
As the album progresses, the instrumentation grows, but not by much. Guitarist Michael Timmins (three of the four members of the band are siblings) plays as if he can barely summon the strength — or perhaps will — to bring pick to strings. The bass anchors the low end as if reporting from the bottom of the well, and the drums brush along at a somnambulant pace. On some of the songs you hear whispers of fiddle, harmonica, accordion or pedal steel from the corners, but the overwhelming feeling is of space — the space between notes, the space between words, the space between the low bass and Timmins’ soft and haunting alto. It’s a dark space, like the desert at night, and to this day, I have a hard time listening to the album during daylight hours. (I’m writing this before dawn.)
Throughout that fall and winter and into the following years I would listen to the album at night, in the basement, hearing my own teenage lonesomeness recognized and affirmed.
In Mihail Sebastian’s short novella, Fragments from a Found Notebook, which I read last weekend, the fictional author of the eponymous notebook, fictionally found in Paris on the Mirabeau Bridge by a fictional narrator, celebrates loneliness in this remarkable passage:
If I have lived my life as it was—good, bad—if I have sunk in the depths of its humiliations, if I have subjected myself to all miseries, those I know and those I don't, if I have agreed to carry behind me the rags of this sad existence, it was because I was certain that no one will know, that no one will understand, that in the end I will remain alone, lonelier than a star in the sky, lonelier than an ox in the stable.
The tragedy of being misunderstood? I do not know it. You mean the pleasure, the passion, the ecstasy of being misunderstood. To feel unique, barricaded within yourself, impenetrable, alone with your superstitions, your symbols, with your signs, with your idols; to know that no one else in the world lives the life you live, that no one can even imagine it, to carry this mystery within, a mystery that cannot be taken away from you, even if you shout it in public squares, even if you scream it on a theater stage, even if you hand it out printed on posters... Lord! I wonder why I deserved such happiness!
When I was probably eight or nine years old, my parents introduced my sister and me to the early-60s comedian and singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer. While introducing his song “Alma,” about a woman who “had, in her lifetime, managed to acquire as lovers practically all of the top creative men in Central Europe,” Lehrer made the observation that “It’s people like [Alma’s lovers and husbands] who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.”
Hank Williams died when he was 29, from a combination of alcohol, morphine (the fictional protagonist of Earle’s novel, Doc Ebersole, is haunted by Williams’ ghost because he gave him the morphine that helped kill him), and, I suppose, lonesomeness. I have outlived him, now, by a whole drinking age.
The first real travel I did after the pandemic arrived was to the Big Bend region of Texas, in the fall of 2021. The region is named for the bend in the Rio Grande river, which makes the western part of the state appear to dip down into Mexico.
The national park nestled at the bottom of the bend is one of the least-visited national parks, and the only one to contain an entire mountain range, the Chisos, within its borders. The Chisos were created by volcanic activity and are surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert, which is littered with rock that rained down on it during an explosion some 42 million years ago.
When the Spanish first arrived in the region in the middle of the 16th century, they pronounced that “throughout this country there are very large and beautiful pasturelands, with good grazing for cattle.” Following centuries of overgrazing, the once-lush native grasses converted into beef then driven to markets in the East, the state of Texas granted 800,000 acres to the federal government in 1943 to create Big Bend National Park, “Texas’s gift to the nation.”
When I was reading Gabriel Winant’s history of Pittsburgh’s economic transition from steel to health care last fall, I was especially struck by this sentence, on page 32:
At every step of steelmaking, a significant part of the work was the constant repair of facilities damaged by the stress of continually hosting such extreme processes.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a working steel mill, let alone been inside one, but it seems to me that you could simply substitute “taking care of your mental health in late-capitalist America” for “steelmaking.”
We are, according to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, facing “an epidemic of loneliness.” When his office released a report in May, Murthy said, “Millions of people are telling us through their stories and statistics that their tank is running on empty when it comes to social connection.”
In a recent op-ed in the Guardian, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich enumerates the many other reasons people’s tanks are running on empty:
Maybe the widespread anxiety and depression, along with the near record rate of suicide, should not be seen as personal disorders.
Maybe they should be seen – in many cases – as rational responses to a society that’s becoming ever more disordered.
After all, who’s not concerned by the rising costs of housing and the growing insecurity of jobs and incomes? ...
Who doesn’t worry about mass shootings at their children’s or grandchildren’s schools?
Who isn’t affected by the climate crisis?
Sometime in the almost five years since I started this newsletter, I wrote down the phrase “Loneliness is where we meet our true selves.” I am confident that this is not my own phrase (if you can identify the author, please let me know in the comments or reply to this email), but I can’t for the life of me remember — or with all the power of Google, figure out — whose it is. Nonetheless, it seems like an appropriate conclusion to this post.
I discovered David Ramsey’s fantastic Substack
when I was scouring the internet for information about this photo of the country music singer Johnny Paycheck (of “Take This Job and Shove It” fame) at a Teamsters picket line.In addition to subscribing, I’ve been periodically diving into Ramsey’s back catalog. I especially recommend “The Flood Year” — a post from almost a year ago about his daughter’s fondness for listening to songs on repeat and the pandemic and death and the window that lets in the light that keeps us going in these bodies, our vessels in the flood.
Your playlist for this issue:
A thought provoking essay on loneliness, Jonathan. Lots to think about here, especially as I spend much of my daytime alone. And yes this quote. “Loneliness is where we meet our true selves.” I like the visual of this, thank you.
Many thanks for the kind words on Tropical Depression!
Lovely post. As companion, if you haven't already come across it, here's a piece I did on Hank Williams and lonesomeness for the Oxford American a while back: https://oxfordamerican.org/magazine/issue-119-winter-2022/i-ain-t-got-nothing-but-time
But the piece that really comes to mind is Marilynne Robinson's essay "When I Was a Child" -- "in the West 'lonesome' is a word with strongly positive connotations." Wonderful essay if you haven't come across it before, it's in her collection When I Was a Child I Read Books, or an earlier version that I think is more or less the same is findable online under a different title.