Value for Tuesday of Week 04 in the season of Dormancy

Separation and Alienation

To be at one with all people and with the physical world is an ideal. One of our three great spiritual pains is that we do not live in that ideal state: we are often separated and alienated.

This is true of every creature, and it is more true of man than of any other creature. He is not only alone; he also knows that he is alone. Aware of what he is, he asks the question of his aloneness. He asks why he is alone, and how he can triumph over his being alone. [Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), Chapter 1.]
The Lord God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden . . . [The Bible, Genesis 3:23.]

Felix Adler, who founded Ethical Culture as a young man, identified three spiritual, or existential pains: separation, powerlessness and meaninglessness. As social creatures, humans suffer when they feel alienated, or separated from others.

Real

True Narratives

Separation:

Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II (Random House, 2019): “A chilling, enchanted naturalism fills the book’s pages: Beloved horses are fed to unsuspecting orphans, cats become mute along with their child companions.”
Safiya Sinclair, How to Say Babylon: A Memoir (37 Ink, 2023): “is a gripping tale of fundamentalism and the light of rebellion piercing through its cracks. Critiques of colonial and patriarchal violence weave throughout, made all the more scathing by Sinclair’s patient understatement. At the book’s core, though, is a personal tale of two artists separated by a chasm.”
Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days: A Memoir (Random House, 2025), is a memoir about her husband’s sudden death at age 60. “Struck by sorrow, Brooks layers well-chosen words around her like blankets: hers, his, others’.”

Alienation:

Technical and Analytical Readings

Photographs

Documentary and Educational Films

Imaginary

Fictional Narratives

In a sense, Hugo tells us, two people who are romantically involved face the obstacle of spiritual separation:

Marius and Cosette were in the dark as to one another. They did not address each other, they did not salute each other, they did not know each other; they saw each other; and like stars of heaven which are separated by millions of leagues, they lived by gazing at each other. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VI, "The Battle Begun".]

The father too experiences a kind of separation:

Old and eternal Mother Nature warned Jean Valjean in a dim way of the presence of Marius. Jean Valjean shuddered to the very bottom of his soul. Jean Valjean saw nothing, knew nothing, and yet he scanned with obstinate attention, the darkness in which he walked, as though he felt on one side of him something in process of construction, and on the other, something which was crumbling away. Marius, also warned, and, in accordance with the deep law of God, by that same Mother Nature, did all he could to keep out of sight of "the father." Nevertheless, it came to pass that Jean Valjean sometimes espied him. Marius' manners were no longer in the least natural. He exhibited ambiguous prudence and awkward daring. He no longer came quite close to them as formerly. He seated himself at a distance and pretended to be reading; why did he pretend that? Formerly he had come in his old coat, now he wore his new one every day; Jean Valjean was not sure that he did not have his hair curled, his eyes were very queer, he wore gloves; in short, Jean Valjean cordially detested this young man. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VII, "To One Sadness Oppose a Sadness and a Half".]

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas. External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and Scrooge never did. [Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843), Stave I: "Marley’s Ghost".]

No one took care of Lazarus, and no friends or kindred remained with him. Only the great desert, enfolding the Holy City, came close to the threshold of his abode. It entered his home, and lay down on his couch like a spouse, and put out all the fires. No one cared for Lazarus. One after the other went away, even his sisters, Mary and Martha. For a long while Martha did not want to leave him, for she knew not who would nurse him or take care of him; and she cried and prayed. But one night, when the wind was roaming about the desert, and the rustling cypress trees were bending over the roof, she dressed herself quietly, and quietly went away. Lazarus probably heard how the door was slammed—it had not shut properly and the wind kept knocking it continually against the post—but he did not rise, did not go out, did not try to find out the reason. And the whole night until the morning the cypress trees hissed over his head, and the door swung to and fro, allowing the cold, greedily prowling desert to enter his dwelling. Everybody shunned him as though he were a leper. [Leonid Andreyev, “Lazarus” (1906).]

Lazarus came to a youth and his lass who loved each other and were beautiful in their love. Proudly and strongly holding in his arms his beloved one, the youth said, with gentle pity: “Look at us, Lazarus, and rejoice with us. Is there anything stronger than love?” And Lazarus looked at them. And their whole life they continued to love one another, but their love became mournful and gloomy, even as those cypress trees over the tombs that feed their roots on the putrescence of the grave, and strive in vain in the quiet evening hour to touch the sky with their pointed tops. Hurled by fathomless life-forces into each other’s arms, they mingled their kisses with tears, their joy with pain, and only succeeded in realising the more vividly a sense of their slavery to the silent Nothing. Forever united, forever parted, they flashed like sparks, and like sparks went out in boundless darkness. [Leonid Andreyev, “Lazarus” (1906).]

Novels and stories:

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbevilles, or A Pure Woman (1891), tells the tragic story of a young woman who seeks enduring romantic love, which eludes her, with tragic consequences. After giving birth to the child of a man she does not love, she desires another man; “Her whole future course of life is determined by the conduct and the competing claims of these two suitors”.
Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland: Stories (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010), “begins and ends with stories featuring graphic and violent sexual encounters, and the tangle of tales that lie in between explore emotional, physical and sexual hazard in all its forms.”
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901): “In the distinction between these two brothers we see decadent perverted types of the Dionysian and Apollonian. This distinction plays its way throughout the novel and is originally made by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche believed that there were two strong forces in culture, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Apollo stands for order and rationality whereas the Dionysian is representative of music, chaos and passion.”
John Wray, Godsend: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018) A central character’s “blankness was surely intentional on Wray’s part. It universalizes, in some ways, Aden’s inchoate longing for meaning. Yet it also made me consider Donald Barthelme’s question, in his short story 'A Shower of Gold': 'How can you be alienated without first having been connected?'”
Benedict Wells, The End of Loneliness: A Novel (Thorndike Press, 2019): “At the heart of the novel are three disparate siblings who are packed off to boarding school after their parents die in a car crash.”
Caryl Phillips, A View of the Empire at Sunset: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018): “Caryl Phillips proudly upholds her standards in this austere, evocative investigation of a life caught “somewhere between colored and white.” It is a novel of acute psychological empathy and understanding.”
Ben Lerner, The Topeka School: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019): “Adam’s faithlessness can no longer be written off as cosmopolitan neurosis. It is instead a symptom of a national crisis of belief, in which structures of understanding crumble and 'regimes of meaning collapse into the spread.'”
Roddy Doyle, Life Without Children: Stories (Viking, 2022): “. . . Stories of Life in Lockdown”.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, The Discomfort of Evening: A Novel (Graywolf, 2020): about the loss of a child; “The title refers to the point in the evening when cows begin to low and call for relief, their udders heavy with milk. The story is about painful repletion of another kind, and of solace that never arrives.”
Bryan Washington, Memorial: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2020): “a Young Gay Couple Is Divided by Race, Class and Culture”.
Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts: A Novel (Knopf, 2021): “. . . the pain of the narrator’s isolation feels extremely real . . .”
Sarah Moss, The Fell: A Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022) “inspired” by the COVID-19 pandemic: “They’re all temporarily stuck at home in the Peak District, in the north of England, eating awkward dinners with relatives on Zoom, avoiding the dishes or grumbling internally over one another’s bathroom etiquette. Kate’s agonized decision to break her mandatory 14-day quarantine and head out for a walk provides the book’s central drama.”
Yasmin Zaher, The Coin: A Novel (Catapult, 2024): “. . . a rich, chic Palestinian schoolteacher in New York City grapples with displacement and American consumerism.”
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection: Fiction (William Morrow, 2024): “This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it.”
David Szalay, Flesh: A Novel (Scribner, 2025): “To read this cool, remote book — among its primary subjects is male alienation — is to feel you are eyeballing the action on a bank of surveillance cameras. There will be no conspiratorial glances at those cameras, no metafictional winks. ‘Flesh’ is the sound a writer makes when he has lined up and shot his darlings as if they were the Romanovs.”

Poetry

Now the stone house on the lake front is finished and the workmen are beginning the fence. / The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that can stab the life out of any man who falls on them. / As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble and all vagabonds and hungry men and all wandering children looking for a place to play. / Passing through the bars and over the steel points will go nothing except Death and the Rain and To-morrow.

[Carl Sandburg, "A Fence" (1916), from "Chicago Poems."]

All day long in fog and wind, / The waves have flung their beating crests / Against the palisades of adamant. / My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago, / Curls of brown were slipping underneath his cap, / He looked at me from blue and steely eyes; / Natty, straight and true, he stepped away, / My boy, he went to sea. / All day long in fog and wind, / The waves have flung their beating crests / Against the palisades of adamant.

[Carl Sandburg, "All Day Long" (1916), from "Chicago Poems."]

A pine is standing lonely / In the North on a bare plateau. / He sleeps; a bright white blanket / Enshrouds him in ice and snow.

He’s dreaming of a palm tree / Far away in the Eastern land / Lonely and silently mourning / On a sunburnt rocky strand.

[Heinrich Heine, Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam ("A spruce tree stands alone") (1823).]

Other poems:

Edgar Allan Poe, “Alone” (1829).
Pablo Neruda, “Don’t Go Far Off” (1959).
Charles Bukowski, “Alone With Everybody” (1977).
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Richard Cory” (1897).
Vikram Seth, “All You Who Sleep Tonight” (1990).
Robert Frost, “Desert Places” (1933).
Pablo Neruda, “A song of despair” (1924) (analysis).
Pablo Neruda, “Saddest Poem” (1924).
Edgar Lee Masters, “Charles Webster” (1915).
Edgar Lee Masters, “Doc Hill” (1915).
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Loneliness” (early 1950s).
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “The Incarceration of Loneliness” (1951).
James Joyce, “I Hear an Army Charging Upon the Land” (ca. 1903).

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

Felix Adler, founder of Ethical Culture, identified three primary spiritual pains. One is separation and alienation - the many ways into which we are separated and alienated from each other, and from our truest selves.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Symphony No. 7 ("Sinfonia Antarctica") (1952) (approx. 39-45’) (recordings) captures the bitter cold and barrenness of the most hostile and remote region on Earth. “Ralph Vaughan Williams’ wife, Ursula, wrote that ‘The idea of great, white landscapes, ice floes, the whales and penguins, bitter winds and Nature’s bleak serenity as a background to man’s endeavor captured RVW’s imagination.’ At the same time, she recounted her husband’s horror as he discovered the amateurish nature of the expedition. 'He despised heroism that risked lives unnecessarily and such things as allowing five to travel on rations for four filled him with fury.'” Barbirolli in 1953, Boult in 1954, Boult in 1969 ***, Previn in 1969, Haitink in 1984, Handley in 1990, Andrew Davis in 1996, Manze in 2019, and Brabbins in 2023, conducted top recorded performances.