loneliness
When you write my epitaph, you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.
Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop, dated August 15, 1957, in Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 225.
A cold winter night. I’m warm enough, yet I’m alone. And I realize that I’ll have to get used to existing quite naturally within this solitude, functioning there, working there, accompanied by, fastened to the “presence of absence.”
Entry dated November 28, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 69.
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
“Solitude,” in Walden: or, Life in the Woods (Philadelphia: Henry Altemus Company, 1899), 156.
I’m not lonely, and I think that has a lot to do with what’s on my bedside table rather than what’s in my bed.
“Michelle Williams: My Week with Michelle,” by Adam Green, Vogue, September 13, 2011.
Everyone is “extremely nice”—and yet I feel entirely alone. (“Abandonitis”).
Entry dated January 8, 1978, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 86.
Solitude = having no one at home to whom you can say: I’ll be back at a specific time or who you can call to say (or to whom you can just say): voilà, I’m home now.
Entry dated November 11, 1977, in Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 44.