Alone

Venus’ Notebook: Edition III

Welcome to Cosmographia . The following is part of our Venus’ Notebook series — a compendium of beautiful things. For the full map of Cosmographia posts, see here.

We live as we dream — alone...

1. Evening in the Garden — Jakub Schikaneder (c. 1907-09)

2. Joseph Conrad, from Heart of Darkness (1899)

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

3. Boreas — John William Waterhouse (1903)

4. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age—it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For every one strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realization he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, ‘How strong I am now and how secure,’ and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. 

5. The Prisoner — Nikolai Yaroshenko (1878)

6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov (1880)

I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

7. Interior With a Standing Woman — Vilhelm Hammershøi (1913)

8. Charlotte Brönte, from Jane Eyre (1847)

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

9. Cain — Emanuel Krescenc Liška (1885)

10. Arthur Schopenhauer

Alone. Yes, that's the key word, the most awful word in the English tongue. Murder doesn't hold a candle to it and hell is only a poor synonym.

11. The Last King — Alfred Kubin (1902)

12. Stephen King

Because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.

13. The Lady of Shalott — John Atkinson Grimshaw (c. 1875)

14. Gabriel García Márquez, from One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Nobody likes being alone that much. I don't go out of my way to make friends, that's all. It just leads to disappointment.

15. Nighthawks — Edward Hopper (1942)

16. Haruki Murakami, from Norwegian Wood (1987)

The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.

17. Orphan Girl at the Cemetery — Eugène Delacroix (1824)

18. Anne Frank, from The Diary of a Young Girl (1947)

No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.

19. The Bard — Thomas Jones (1774)

20. Gautama Buddha

If you're lonely when you're alone, you're in bad company.

21. The Road in the Rye — Grigoriy Myasoyedov (1881)

22. Jean-Paul Satre

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.

23. Landscape with Hiking Man — Thomas Fearnley (1830)

24. Henry David Thoreau, from Walden (1854)

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain. Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...I am Pagliacci.

25. Stańczyk — Jan Matejko (1862)

26. Alan Moore, from The Watchmen (1987)

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

27. The Monk Inok — Konstantin Savitskiy (1897)

28. Blaise Pascal, from Pensées (1670)

No, I didn't imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.

29. The Monk by the Sea — Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1808-10)

30. Franz Kafka, from Letters to Felice (c. 1912-17)

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.
And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.
"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.
"Certainly," said man.
"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.
And He went away.

31. Night in Saint-Cloud — Edvard Munch (1890)

32. Kurt Vonnegut, from Cat’s Cradle (1963)

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone—

33. Tomb of Böcklin — Ferdinand Keller (1901–1902)

34. Edgar Allan Poe, from “Alone” (1829)

Suddenly I’m all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I’m alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyze is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I’m so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.

35. Way of Silence — Frantisek Kupka (1903)

36. Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet (c. 1930s)

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.

37. Dream — Joan Brull (c. 1905)

38. Roald Dahl, from Mathilda (1988)

Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

39. Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) — Vincent Van Gogh (1890)

40. Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (1929)

We're each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

41. Hope — George Frederic Watts (1886)

42. Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975)

I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.

43. Despair — Edvard Munch (1894)

44. Daniel Keyes, from Flowers for Algernon (1966)

How could I
    ever be
      alone
in the same 
   world as
           you?

45. The Last Dryad — Henri de Gabriel Guay (1898)

46. Me, “How could I ever be alone”

No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.

47. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog — Caspar David Friedrich (c. 1817)

48. Friedrich Nietzsche, from Untimely Meditations (1873)

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. 

49. Knight at the Crossroads — Viktor Vasnetsov (1882)

50. Hunter S. Thompson, from The Proud Highway (1997)