Loneliness as a Way of Life (Hardcover)

~ Thomas Dumm (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Loneliness as a Way of Life is a book about coming to believe in this world, a world in which loneliness is inevitable and connections are still possible. It is also a risky book, because of the way Dumm weaves the personal into the literary and both into politics. The risk is well run: Dumm's is an untimely piece, essential for the time in which we live.
--William E. Connolly (20081129)

Avoiding cynicism and sentimentality alike, Thomas Dumm's penetrating and painfully personal meditations on the modern condition of loneliness may show us more about ourselves than we can easily bear. Through subtle and provocative readings of Shakespeare, Melville, Arendt, and other thinkers, Dumm finds terms for acknowledging and inhabiting his own loneliness, and perhaps ours as well. His calm yet insistently disarming voice claims and challenges us, even when we resist it.
--Robert Gooding-Williams, author of Look, A Negro!: Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics (20081213)

Thomas Dumm is a wise guide and learned counselor for the great Socratic question: How to live? We are deeply enriched owing to his wisdom and compassion.
--Cornel West (20090104)

[Dumm] uses the works of past writers and philosophers such as Shakespeare, Thoreau, and Foucault, along with personal reflections on his feelings after the death of his wife, to explain the multifaceted nature of loneliness. Dumm concludes that loneliness isn't something that we overcome, but it is part of our psychological, political, and social lives. We all share these common areas of loneliness, and only through reflecting on them can we gain a better understanding of how to live with our loneliness.
--Scott Duimstra (Library Journal 20081222)

Loneliness as a Way of Life doesn't try to be cut-and-dried. It is quizzical, often deeply skeptical, about our intentions as a species. It recognizes that society--and sociability--are messy affairs that bring mixed blessings. Especially in his last, rousing chapter on Emerson, freedom, and responsibility, Mr. Dumm offers a way out of the morass he has described. He makes no false claims that we can vanquish loneliness or fix our thinking in a fresh groove. Instead, he proposes the tempered idea that friendship and group accountability can--indeed, must--live together with our existential solitude.
--Christopher Lane (New York Sun )

The greatest writers may have shown how language itself is inadequate to the experience of loneliness. But we have written our experience of loneliness deeply into the language. That too, though, goes to underscore the point that Mr. Dumm's honest book makes: While the "lonely self will always be with us," we can at least come together in search of imaginative ways of expressing that loneliness. We can "write and read to tell each other how we are to be lonely together."
--Andrew Stark (Wall Street Journal )

[A] meditative and intensely personal volume.
--Sarah Barmak (Toronto Star )

An intriguing volume...This modern world may be the "way of loneliness," but readers should not shy away from the state. In fact, Dumm asserts that loneliness is the impetus that gives us autonomy, the ability to make decisions on our own terms. Although the feeling may be painful, it is only through loneliness that we become true individuals able to make rational decisions and able to interact with others as rational beings. And, in an odd twist, it is this true sense of self-awareness that leads us to seek the community of others.
--Orli Low (Los Angeles Times )

For Dumm, loneliness is really about loss. He argues that we have to be willing to reflect on the tragic dimensions of human existence, including the inevitability of our own deaths, to face and ameliorate our loneliness...Only through earnest reflection and a willingness to examine how we live our lives can the ache of loneliness be transformed into its less painful companion: solitude.
--Katharine Mieszkowski (Salon )

Product Description

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

(20080930)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067403113X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674031135
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #102,787 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Audience confusion, August 21, 2009

By	Kenneth H. Watman "Ken" (Newport, Rhode Island) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The problem Professor Dumm and his book suffers from is the need to speak to two different audiences that prove utimately incompatible, the academic and the intelligent, lay public. Professor Dumm is a scholar, a political scientist at Amherst. He wants to be published by an academic, refereed press. So his book must meet whatever methodological and ideological standards that hold sway. Whatever those are right now, abstract, theory-driven writing is required. Hence he spends a lot of time discussig his theory of the Missing Mother, which I do not find at all convincing. Like all academic books, this one is heavily footnoted, and it alludes frequently other scholarly work, as well as to classical literature. It is not a very readable book.

All of this is well and good, but it certainly does not speak very adequately to Professor Dumm's second audience: people who are motivted to read the book, becaue they may be seeking consolation from their loneliness, or they may just be seeking a better understanding of loneliness, whether they are lonely or not. In other words, intelligent, but non-academic people. In my case, though not seeking consolation, I am lonely, and the idea of lonliness as a way of life was intriguing to me. But I was frustrated by Professor Dumm's book, because so little of it seems to speak directly and plainly to exactly its title, loneliness as a way of life. There are parts which I think are intended by Professor Drumm to do that. I have in mind those parts when he goes inward to his reflections about his own loneliness, it's sources, and what he thinks about it. But there are too few of those. And Professor Dumm's writing style is not intimate, though he certainly addresses intimate matters.

But, the book simply is not broad or rich enough to speak adequately to both audiences, the academic and laypeople interested in loneliness; it cannot bear that weight. I don't think a book can be both academic and intimate. The academic crowds out the lay by a wide margin. I realize Professor Dumm may never have expected his book to speak to anyone but an academic audience. But, in that case, Harvard Press, or the blurbs on the dust cover, would have been better off talking about this book's contribution to the academic literature, and not about it's general wisdom on loneliness that is a part of so many peoples' lives.

So read it for its academic content, which, as I say, I don't rate highly. But, I am not an academic. I can't recommend it as a way of understanding better or addressing one's own loneliness.

24 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars This is a Dumm Book, October 13, 2008

By	G. Charles Steiner "Charles Steiner" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a terrible, misfocused book, and in trying to bring oneself as much as possible to it in response to what the author has tried to bring to it, as the author asks of each reader in his Preface, this reader found the process largely tedious and unrewarding, verifiable by a subtle but oppressive headache, having read the book over the course of one weekend. The last and longest chapter, "Grieving," is much to be avoided, or, at worst, skimmed.

This book is not authentically an exploration of loneliness nor is it a philosophy of loneliness.

This work is only a clumsy quasi-political rumination ("a convoluted intellectual and emotional journey," says the author in his Preface) about personal identity and personal loss wherein the author, a political science professor, and from a lonely vantage point in the present and in the presence or context of the Bush Administration, thinks out loud about himself and the world using epiphantic language borrowed from contemporary thinkers such as Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze as well as Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler and Sigmud Freud (another con artist!), while also chewing on some of the wise conundrums of early American thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and W.E.B. Du Bois on the subject of identity and loss.

The author lost his mother and his wife through death, and then suffered the departure of his daughter from home. He asks, "What are we to do with our selves in the face of our losses?" This book is the consequence of asking such a question.

There is no good writing in the book. The author's favorite way of expressing himself is in "the historically contingent inevitability of individual embodiment" and as such he tries to avoid "the overcoming of the dialogue of inner thought with the solipsism of objective logic."

Almost all of the writing about loneliness per se is to be found in unsubstantianted epiphantic assertions littered quixotically between the first two chapters, "Being" and "Having": (1) "Our loneliness is always deepest in those moments when we face the terror of nothing." (2)"We too live in the matrix of the missing mother. . . . This is the way of loneliness." (3) "...loneliness itself involves a failure of the self-descriptive capacity." (4) "...loneliness is an experience of disappearance...." (5) "At its worst, loneliness is a denial of the possibility of a politics of becoming." (6) "When we are lonely we are actually alone, deserted by all others, including our own other self." (7) The state of loneliness . . . is an experience composed of a loss of the capacity to experience." (8) "To be lonely is to be without recourse to others." (9) "...capitalism may be thought of as a symptom of the lonely self." (10) "...loneliness derives from a condition of being superfluous that grows out of uprootedness, the lacking of a place in the world..."

The last two chapters, "Loving" and "Grieving" discuss little about loneliness itself at all; they're totally focused on loss.

The enjoyable parts of the book consist of the author's literary analyses: the missing mother and Cordelia's silent role in "King Lear," the relationship between the father and the son and their respective identities in "Death of a Salesman," the relationship and identity of Ishmael and Pip in "Moby Dick," and a retelling of the film "Paris, Texas," which reveals the author's personal insights into the importance of this film. The writing here is relatively free of pretentious cant and reader-friendly. Still, none of these analyses has anything to do with the theme loneliness; they have all to do with tropes of loss and identity.

In the Epilogue entitled "Writing," the author confesses he is using the writing for his book to help with his grieving process and to come to terms with his new identity as a widower. "Loneliness as a way of life"? Hardly.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote something salubrious and pertinent to the contents of Mr. Dumm's book but it is something which he did not reference in his book:

"Get wise to yourself, now trot
Out of that mucky grove!
There's more to earth than this spot --
Move!"

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Pitying Mr. Dumm, January 16, 2009

By	G. Everts "guido everts" (Amstelveen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Thomas Dumm analyses loneliness by displaying his personal quest for pity. In his last chapter, called 'grieving', he sums up in lengthy details his recent personal losses in his family life, made intelligible by comparing his experiences with those of many authoritative writers. It's a pity that Dumm shows us his lack of restraint in such a blatant way, because in the beginning of the book he makes a firm point about loneliness. Instead of grieving about one's own experiences one should I think try to analyse one's culture (a word that's lacking in Dumm's vocabulary) on a more extended level, with better critical tools than used in this book. A comparison of 'our' (a word Dumm uses many times without defining it) Western culture with non-Western cultures, like China, India or Africa, could reveal a tendency to loneliness in the West with deeper historical roots than World War I and on a broader scale than is suggested by Dumm's personal experiences. Those experiences are pitiful, there's no doubt about it, but they are universal, not specific Western. I'm longing for Dumm's next book about loneliness, including the word 'culture', excluding the word 'we' and concluding by a firm and critical proposition about what to do with a culture that spreads the shade of loneliness as its unwilling brand.