It seems counter-intuitive to me to christen a new blog with a subject as apparently alienating as loneliness, but it also seems appropriate. My "Coming-of-Age Novel" class is currently busy making its way through James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I know for certain that the moment the Stephen Dedalus became sympathetic character in my mind was during his stay in the infirmary at Clongowes boarding school. He heard the whistle of a train passing by the school, it reminded him of home, and he wished he could be with his mother.
Maybe it was the train that made this moment stick in my mind: I've always loved trains and train whistles, and they make me feel nostalgic. There are so many songs I know about trains, and many of them are blues songs, and they seem very connected to loneliness imagery. "I hear that train a-comin', a-comin' 'round the bend..." or "Freight train, freight train, goin' so fast....I don' know what train I'm on, and I don't know where I'm goin'" If it is the trains, then maybe this moment is only special for people who see trains with that kind of weight. I don't know. Weigh in, if you feel the same way.
Maybe it's the whole picture. Being alone, sick, and far from anyone comforting or familiar is something that anyone who's gotten sick at school can relate to. Putting your head down on the desk under fluorescent light and wanting to go home, but knowing that you aren't really sick enough to go. Or walking down to the office to call home, realizing that they are at work, and being consigned to the padded bench in the nurse's office with dimmed light from the curtain window and a big poster of a grinning toothbrush leering down at you. So very childish, and yet so familiar. (A disclaimer: I know that this is familiar to a relatively miniscule group of people. If it's not familiar to you, I don't mean to offend you. Put my meaning into terms you can work with, if you feel so moved.)
Whatever the case, loneliness is a well-trodden theme in much of classic Western literature. Fair enough, since reading is so largely a solitary activity. I just noticed it particularly here, in the transition from Stephen Dedalus as a binarily-analytical child to an emotive human being.
Part of me still thinks it was the trains.
