Letters at 3AM

When Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were writing each other the most important letters in the American canon. When Thoreau died in 1862, the republic Adams and Jefferson created was rending itself in civil war. In Walden, Thoreau wrote: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation ... From the desperate city you go into the desperate country ... A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." He would not have been surprised to see that our games and amusements have become steadily more dominant and disruptive, nor that quiet desperation and unconscious despair now generate an overwhelming cacophony emitted from millions of loudspeakers, cell phones, and engines. The unbearable silence at the core of our loneliness hides under an onslaught of inescapable noise.

We may be nostalgic for a quieter rural era when values seemed defined and dependable; but in 1859, when Thoreau looked at smoke rising from the chimney of a country farmhouse, he found the scene deceptive: "When I look down on that roof I am not reminded of the mortgage which the village bank has on that property -- that that family long since sold itself to the devil and wrote the deed with their blood. I am not reminded that ... the man at the pump is watering the milk [for dishonest profit]. I am not reminded of the idiot that sits by the kitchen fire."

Another passage, from 1852: "... see the farmhouses nearly half a mile apart, few and solitary, in these great fields between these stretching woods ... the still, stagnant, heart-eating, life-everlasting, and gone-to-seed country ... wherein the new-married wife cannot live for loneliness ... see young J. Hosmer's house, whither he returns with his wife in despair after living in the city ... the young man pines to get nearer the post office and the lyceum, is restless and resolves to go to California, because the depot is a mile off (he hears the rattle of the cars at a distance and thinks the world is going by and leaving him) ... and none of the farmer's sons are willing to be farmers ... where some men's breaths smell of rum, having smuggled in a jugful to alleviate their misery and solitude ... I say, standing there and seeing these things, I cannot realize that this is the hopeful young America which is famous throughout the world for its activity and enterprise ..."

If Thoreau had seen people very like these darting around in SUVs, watching lots of television, piling up credit-card debt, gobbling drugs legal and illegal, and surfing the Net for want of face-to-face contact, he might have said that technology has done little but amplify our desperation. Everything has changed but our loneliness and our inarticulate confusion.

Sherwood Anderson was born in 1876, the year the Sioux defeated Custer at Little Bighorn. He died in 1941, the year of Pearl Harbor. In 1919 he published Winesburg, Ohio, the first great book of American short stories, in which Anderson described another America we sentimentalize: the small town, a world unto itself, as yet uninfected by broadcasts from the cities. On the surface Anderson's Winesburg is calm enough. But "Hands" tells of Wing Biddlebaum, "forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts," who lived in terror of his own hands because they (not he, surely) wanted something unthinkable: to touch boys.

And there is the restless Elizabeth Willard of "Mother." "Although for years she had hated her husband, her hatred had always before been a quite impersonal thing. He had merely been a part of something else that she hated." That "something else" was the mediocrity that nearly everyone in Winesburg settled for. The best thing in her life is her son George, who at least longs not to accommodate the mediocre; yet even with George her feelings are inarticulate: "She thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them." She has lived the life that many say they want -- home, family, community -- yet she feels that "some obscure disease had taken the fire out of her." Old at 45, for Elizabeth the phrase life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is like an incantation in a foreign language.

And there is Winesburg's Alice Hindman of "Adventure." "At twenty-seven Alice was tall and somewhat slight. Her head was large and overshadowed her body. Her shoulders were a little stooped ... She was very quiet but beneath a placid exterior a continual ferment went on." That was America for Sherwood Anderson: placid work-a-day exteriors that disguise a continual ferment, an unanswered longing that slowly rots one from within. "Deep within her there was something that would not be cheated by phantasies and that demanded some definite answer from life." Driven by desires she dare not express, even to herself, late one night she runs naked into the rain. Her exterior is, for once, not placid. What's awful about Alice's adventure is that it changes nothing. She has merely terrified herself. Running back inside, Alice throws herself into bed and weeps. "'What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful,' she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg."

Anderson concludes: "On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of the living."

What are the figures on our movie and TV screens but ghosts of the living, enacting fantasies beyond common courage? America has become the haunted palace described by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), a culture overwhelmed by "Vast forms, that move fantastically/To a discordant melody,/While .../A hideous throng rush out forever ..." America is so proud of change; America's changes have swept the planet; many believe our very psyches are being "re-wired" by technology; but if the heart-eating loneliness at the core of so many people has not changed, then what's really changed except our ever-increasing capacity for disruption?

The painter Edward Hopper was born in 1882 -- the year the world's first hydroelectric plant, designed by Thomas Edison, began operation in Appleton, Wis. (an enormous innovation that would alter rural life all over the world). Hopper died in 1967, year of the Summer of Love, race riots, and Vietnam, when the unmanned Surveyor 5 landed on the moon. In Hopper's lifetime he witnessed enormous outer change, but remained unimpressed. He concentrated on images of quiet desperation -- moments of unbearable stillness when the day is either done or about to begin, and when men and women must either face or forcibly ignore their isolation. His people are consumed and confined by a privacy that knows neither limits nor release. In "Eleven AM" a young woman has put on only her shoes, or she's taken off all clothing but her shoes; she sits with her elbows on her knees, staring out the window into an airshaft. Will she dress and go out; take off her pumps and go to bed; lie down with her shoes on? You can ask those questions but not, "What is she thinking?" What she's thinking is unreachable. That is the point.

Everyone knows Hopper's Nighthawks (1942). A downtown big city diner in the wee hours, no traffic, no one in the street; a couple at the counter, tired and grim, concentrate on their cigarettes; another man at the counter has his back to us in a twisted posture, so as to avoid looking at the couple; and what they used to call a "soda jerk," in a white uniform, does some unspecified chore behind the counter (we can't see his hands). No talk, no eye contact. Why is this one of the two or three most famous American paintings? Because it says something about us that has not changed since it was painted 60 years ago, something so stark and lonely that it needs no commentary -- for we look at these "nighthawks" with the same expression that's on their faces.

In Hopper's High Noon (1949) a pretty woman stands at the door of a plank house on a flat plain, her robe half-open, her body shining. She's wearing high heels. Standing like that at noon. Waiting? Longing? Forever? Whatever is changing beyond her horizons has not altered the obscure inner life that's brought her to this door. In Excursions in Philosophy (1959) a half-naked woman sleeps (or lies awake) on a single bed, her face to the wall; a fully dressed man sits on the bed's edge with his back to her and his hands in a hopeless posture. Beside him on the purple bedsheet is an open book. The book is no help. All the tumult, all the culture, all the relentless historical brouhaha, has not changed the irreducible loneliness that haunts you like the ghost of your life.