Aesthetics of Loneliness / Ashish Gorde

"...It is a very inspiring article on 'The Spectacles of American Isolation' written by Mark Feeney and was reprinted in the Gulf News' Weekend Review. It's not included in the Review's web edition, and I guess, it could be partly because it's a syndicated article from the New York Times News Service. The main focus of the article is an examination of Edward Hopper's paintings, and how he could be considered to be the Great American Artist. Fenney writes, 'the sources of his popular appeal are obvious enough: immediate accessibility; a subtle yet vivid colour sense; familiar, but not too familiar, subject matter; a fondness for picturesque settings such as New York, Maine and Cape Cod; even a whiff of prurience.' However, he goes on to describe what he feels to be a "Hopperesque" quality, and calls it loneliness. "

I missed reading this because of the recent flood of new posts on the board. But reading Ashish Gorde's essay, in relation to the original article by Mark Feeney at Boston Globe which triggered it, was interesting, because I've always thought the opposite about Hopper's creations, that it was about the healing power of solitude, rather than the pain of loneliness. I call it the elevator consciousness ( a post on this later) - it brings to me that moment when you surface for air from being submerged in a group of people, forced to breathe in their exhaled opinions, purposes and personalities. I'm an extrovert, no sociopath, but I feel no pathos in Hopper, only respite and relief. I feel the transience of the situation.The person reading in the train, or the lonely diner in the highway restaurant is alone, but only in passing. Tomorrow he will reach home and be inescapably among people again.

It could be entirely my take, maybe Hopper did intend for them to portray loneliness imposed, rather than solitude chanced upon, that I tend to read into it. Maybe I find solitude rarer than company, living in a crowded urban scene, and long for the spaces, so American as the article says, where one can breathe free. But I find his other attractive aspect, his matter-of-factness, revealing and supportive of my reading. He does not portray a permanent loneliness, he does not portray tragedy. The people are all placid in their aspect, inward looking, but not mourning. The loneliness seems more located in the space they are in, and the oddness of their position in it, rather than in the person himself, and the person seems acutely aware of his position, but chooses to accept it, because it is not permanent. In this acceptance, a loosening of norms of sociability, in this tendency to revel in the aloneness, rather than seek a superficial conversation with a stranger, a waiter in the restaurant or a fellow passenger, Hopper highlights a moment of self-sufficiency that I have admired all along.