I have tried to talk about the issues in this campaign... and this has sometimes been a lonely road, because I never meet anybody coming the other way.
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps.
It was one of those hot, silent nights, when people sit at windows listening for the thunder which they know will shortly break; when they recall dismal tales of hurricanes and earthquakes; and of lonely travellers on open plains, and lonely ships at sea, struck by lightning.
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is no beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.
I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
Distrust brings frustration and fear. So therefore, the lonely feeling automatically come. So, lonely feeling is not creation of environment, but creation of your own mental attitude.
At length his lonely cot appears in view,
Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
Th' expectant wee-things, toddling, stacher thro'
To meet their Dad, wi' flichterin noise an' glee.