The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: loneliness

  • Cafes (Sunday Cartoons & Marginalia)

    Sketches from the edges of notebooks, nine images under a thematic title.

    This week’s theme, cafes, is taken from Hemingway’s short story titled “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which two waiters, one younger and complaining, the other older and empathetic, wait to go home while a lone customer, an old man, lingers on, drinking.

    Click anywhere in the gallery for scroll and captions.

    A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

    Hand-drawn cafe interior couple at a table and waiters in background, yellow traffic lights, bold black border.
    Orange brick sidewalk cafe, couple at table, each with a red wine glass.
    Lone person with drink at a table talking to a cell phone that fills the chair opposite.
    Waiter taking order at a table for two.
    Couple at a table in a cafe, the word Coffee in high window over door, letters backward, the word Noir on the floor in foreground.
    Stick figure couple at a table, one drinking wine, the other a beer. Quote bubbles say, "Check the legs on this wine" and "This beer is very hoppy."
    A cup of coffee looks like a face, eyes drawn over the cup, the handle an ear, a mouth, and a shirt collar saucer. Cursive text reads "Coffee au lait."
    A cup of coffee with a scribbled face emerging from the foam like latte art; the word 'Barista' is broken into vertical syllables: Bar, is, and ta.
    A dark cafe at night with couples at the bar and tables. Three red pendant lamps with yellow stylized light rays hang over the bar. Two waiters stand behind the counter at opposite ends.

  • The Art of Being Alone

    You may never feel so alone as when wandering around in a crowd of strangers. Or sitting in a church pew at the wedding of an old friend you can’t really say you know anymore back in town for the ceremony then on the road again. Or sitting with a parent who keeps asking you what your name is, or during a visit with your child you no longer recognize. Or at a reunion luncheon with some past coworkers.

    You buy a ticket to the baseball park and settle in with a box of Cracker Jack1 to watch the game and feel a part of something bigger than yourself, not the team, but the cheering crowd, then comes news three of your favorite players have been traded away, and by the 7th inning stretch, the crowd starts to thin, the score lopsided, the bullpen early emptied.

    “The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
    Petals on a wet, black bough.”2

    And you don’t really know the players, and from the distance of your outfield seat, all the players look the same. Still, nowhere to go, you sit until the fans have all gone home, the players off the field hitting the showers, and security comes to check on you and escort you out a side gate.

    You might have been a clean-cut kid and been to college too,3 but in spite of the degrees earned, or maybe as a result of them, you never learned to be alone, to enjoy inertia. If all the other pool balls would just sit still, you could sink the 8 ball and call it a thrill.

    Not to worry, Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) has come to save the day4.

    “It may prove hard to resist an artificial companion that knows everything about you, never forgets, and anticipates your needs better than any human could. Without any desires or goals other than your satisfaction, it will never become bored or annoyed; it will never impatiently wait for you to finish telling your story so that it can tell you its own.”5

    At issue is can a machine substitute for a human in building a satisfying relationship where only one party enjoys, and suffers from, consciousness, while the other party observes and salves and solves (an artificial Jeeves6) your every agony, while themselves unable to actually feel what you are feeling, or even what they are feeling, for they can’t feel either way. They will never be able to cry real tears with you, just shed crocodile tears. But then we get this:

    “Solitude is the engine of independent thought – a usual precondition for real creativity.”7

    “Engine” seems a poor word choice given the context. If the mind is an engine, why can’t A. I. have a mind?

    Loneliness, not to be confused with alienation, detachment, isolation. We can feel lonely, apparently, anywhere, with anyone, in any setting or activity. Is loneliness therefore an existential decision made over time as we negate the possibility of others to be with us, for us to be with others? In other words, is it our own fault? Thoreau wasn’t lonely; why can’t we be more like Thoreau?

    “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. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.”8

    Paul Bloom, writing in The New Yorker, about the possibility for A. I. to cure loneliness, emphasizes that for the terminally lonely (“the elderly or the cognitively impaired” p. 57), A. I. could indeed be a good thing, but for the rest of us, loneliness is part of being human and to give it up would make us less human. Ouch: that’s caring authority. And it is against that authority that the artist retreats.

    1. “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” Norworth and Tilzer, 1908. ↩︎
    2. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” Poetry Magazine, April, 1913. ↩︎
    3. “Motorpsycho Nightmare,” Bob Dylan, 1964, from the album “Another side of Bob Dylan. ↩︎
    4. Mighty Mouse theme song. ↩︎
    5. “What will it mean for A.I. to solve loneliness?” Paul Bloom, The New Yorker, July 21, 2025, p. 55. ↩︎
    6. “Jeeves seems to know when I’m awake by a sort of telepathy. He always floats in with the cup exactly two minutes after I come to life. Makes a deuce of a lot of difference to a fellow’s day.” The Inimitable Jeeves. ↩︎
    7. p. 56, Bloom, The New Yorker. ↩︎
    8. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, from the chapter “Solitude.” ↩︎
    9. “All Alone Am I,” Brenda Lee, 1962. ↩︎
    All Alone Am I9
  • Only the Lonely

    Only the Lonely

    Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, has declared loneliness a national health crisis. It’s as if the Pope questioned the doctrine of transubstantiation. The pioneer spirit feels a needle puncturing its balloon. It reads like a headline in the Onion, a bad joke.

    Loneliness is epidemic, Murthy says, crosses and affects all sociodemographic boundaries and classes. There are no distinctions. The loneliness virus can infect anyone. Murthy recently traveled around the country, and everywhere he went, he talked to folks who questioned their self-worth, their connections to family and friends, the value of their very existence.

    We might jump to an explanation, our personal predispositions and assumptions slipping into gear. Apparently, a trip to Walmart to stock up on beer and chips for the big game on TV is not enough to fill the void, but then neither is driving to Rodeo Drive in your Rolls Royce for a new dress. In church, one feels pewed-in, and the kiss of peace lacks true touch. And the more Mega, Meta, or MAGA one gets, the worse the symptoms of loneliness.

    Loneliness looks and feels much like depression and anxiety, a lost in the world feeling, made worse by the vast numbers of people surrounding, none of whom one might talk to. One’s old drinking buddy is on the wagon. One’s ex (spouse, friend, religion, school, job) is full of the need for schadenfreude gotchas. One’s pronoun choices come up short. One feels a need to be a verb, as Buckminster Fuller said, only to have one’s grammar or usage corrected. And in one’s own home, one might feel like a direct object, put upon by a subject, or a noun without a verb.

    I’m sorry I don’t have a cure, but Murthy has proposed a plan. Might be worth Googling (or see link below). Meantime, I’m reminded of the old Roy Orbison song:

    Only the lonely
    Know the way I feel tonight
    Only the lonely
    Know this feeling ain’t right

    https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/priorities/connection/index.html