Customer Reviews

Loneliness as a Way of Life

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2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

Loneliness as a Way of Life was, quite simply, unreadable. A wordly, self important rehashing of the writing of others, with no insights for the average reader. I only bought this book because I saw and ad in a respected publication but now I realize anyone can buy an ad. A complete waste of time, money and thought. Mr. Dumm owes me the purchase price, and many hours of my life back.

The other reviewers who have critiqued this book are spot on, so I will not elaborate on points already made. This book is quite simply unreadable, a pedantic display of academic writing that is completely inaccessible to a broader audience.

This book is so bad.

For an expert on loneliness this author really knows how to alienate a reader.

He continually uses books and films you have never seen as examples to make abstract principles more confusing.

Sometimes dedicating twenty pages to decoding entire scenes.

I haven't been this frustrated and disappointed in a book for years.

Normally, I am neither a literalist nor a stickler for titles: I am not disappointed that the Ford Mustang does not resemble a mustang, or for that matter, any horse; in fact, I would be puzzled if it did. Similarly, I harbor no expectation that Time Magazine publish weekly treatises on the dialectic of time nor that USA Today publish daily satellite photos of the USA as it appears today. The fact that I own several Whirlpool appliances and not one would make an appropriate bath stirs no resentment within me.

However, when I purchase a book titled "Loneliness as a Way of Life", whose back cover goes on to reinforce that title, then my expectation is a text that - as silly as this sounds! - discusses, hmmm, I don't know, perhaps something akin to loneliness as a way of life. Instead, the book deconstructs King Lear, Death of a Salesman, and then - why not! - Moby Dick. Why not.

In the interest of truth in advertising, I would like to suggest some alternate, equally irrelevant titles for this book: "Chrysler Semi-Elliptical Driveshafts, 1991-1996", "Macrolide Resistance in Streptococcal Pharyngitis", "Webster's Dictionary, 11th Ed.", and my favorite - "The Accidental and Deliberate Use of Misnomer in Driving Book Sales".

While there is no doubt that this book is well-researched, it is not what I expected at all. As a lonely survivor of incredible personal losses (husband, brother, father) I was looking for a personal account of how we come to live with our loneliness. This author has suffered similar tragedies, but he writes in the cold, professorial tones of someone lecturing students. It is a short book, but a very slow read. Grab a hi-liter. You are headed back to the lecture hall. Very impersonal. I wanted solace. You won't find it here.

In the book jacket, the publisher notes: "Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is [] 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 [different] way." This statement, along with the table of contents and editorial reviews convinced me that this book is an epistemological device - an individual's case study on identity, on how/what it is to live. I write this review, with this in mind.

A little background about the reader: Just turned thirty, a year and a half away from my first undergraduate degree in Philosophy&Mathematics. (Am I an academic or a layman? I consider myself half-ass at both at best.) My parents are both still alive and I do not have a wife who died. Though, I've had my heart broken a few times. My first funeral experience occurred weeks before my seventh birthday: my father's mother passed away. My father, one of seven children raised in some days with no shoes, food, or toilet paper managed to defy the probabilities of a young death. I teared up some wondering how my father and his siblings must have felt. To this day, we are still grieving her death. Other notable deaths which have effected me during my lifetime: a friend's homicide at the age of twenty-three, an acquaintance's suicide, the death of my grandfather at ninety-something and the death of my aunt last year from cancer; she was fifty-something.

Before being informed of this book, and after reading the editorial reviews, my wonder about loneliness was/is about how disinterested we are of each other. How is it that we, in this country, bear children to be important, unique individuals though fail to tell them that half of society will shun you when you grow up? I've had many "friends" but why This Divide now? Why this separation of "class"? You have your ways of income, have your particular interests, and I have mine, lets continue having dinner and share our experiences/findings. We grew up informed of this divide, were disgusted at it when we were in middle and high school. And now are a part of it. James Baldwin was recently quoted as saying, '"It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak." Dumm writes: "[T]here is a deficiency or lack of connection to others that has become the defining characteristic of a particular class, gender, race, and/or even generational cohort who are perceived to be the exemplars of the relevant ordinary person under examination. For most of these scholars, this ordinary person is defined by a timid introspection that turns away from common concern to the pursuit of a selfish life." (25) This is old news.

I enjoyed Dumm's commentary on identity. His sharing of memories with his wife, son, daughter, parents and siblings. He draws a connection to Shakespeare's King Lear in its story of disconnect between parent and child. Throughout the book, Dumm reveals Lear as not only a suffocating patriarchal figure but as a generic authoritarian synonymous to "political leaders who are unwilling or unable to be losers, grievers." (169) The child, Cordelia, is left alone in her own state of loneliness to journey upon. She is muddled in a "White Event" [think being given a blank canvas, a paintbrush, with white paint and told to ... paint your life]. Along with other factors, individuals may be stuck in this white event (i.e. state of grievance) due to selfish "(dis)possessions" of material objects, emotions, wants, etc. Interesting viewpoint.

This book contained some humor with Dumm's utilization of etymology and other stuff (Hint: Moby trivia) to describe his arguments. I also liked how he used non-fiction: politics, real-life experiences, Emerson quotations and fiction: Groundhog Day, Moby Dick, Death of a Salesman as examples to support his arguments.

Though that said, I wouldn't say that I found all arguments as strong [e.g. Pip and Ishmael (Moby Dick), Linda Lohman (DoS), Freud's id/ego, grief as public phenomenon].

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.

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!"

The reviews on this book are both right and wrong. It IS a more academic text, but I found it very useful as clarifying some ideas of the politics of loneliness. If you have not read a little Judith Butler, this book might not be for you. If you have, you'll probably think it's amazing.