Thomas Wolfe, From a letter to his sister, 1937:
"I agree with you when you say that bitterness is one of the things in life that kills....There is another thing in life that is hard to bear that fortunately you do not know much about---that is loneliness....I think I learned about being alone when I was a child about eight years old and I think that I have known about it ever since. People, I think, often mean well by children but are often cruel because of something insensitive or cruel in their own natures which they cannot help. It is not a good thing, however, for older people to tell a little child that he is selfish, unnatural and inferior to the other members of his family in qualities of generosity and nobility, because a child is small and helpless and has no defence, and although he is no worse than other children, and is in fact as full of affection, love and good-will as anyone could be, he may in time come to believe the things which are told him about himself, and that is when he begins to live alone and wants to be alone and if possible to get far, far away from the people who have told him how much better they are than he is....I can also say that the habit of loneliness, once formed, grows on a man from year to year, and he wanders across the face of the earth and has no home and is in exile, and he is never able to break out of the prison of his own loneliness again, no matter how much he wants to. So with all your troubles and misfortunes of the last few years you can be thankful being alone has not been one of them."Wolfe's original title for LHA, even before the second title of O Lost, was The Building of A Wall. Now I understand why.
"Look homeward Angel now and melt with ruth: And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth." (John Milton, Lycidas)
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