Download or read book LOVELY LONELY LIFE written by Mary Kelly Black and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2007-11-14 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These journal entries comprise two volumes of selections (Vol. I, 1973-1982, Vol. II, 1983-2003). Volume I includes an Introduction and some biographical memories. As Stephane Mallarme considered literature the antithesis of journalism, a journal is often the antithesis of a diary. It is of less interest to record moods and events, or barriers to self-realization, than to have ideas and insights about these. As a journal-keeper, I am generally disinterested in diurnal details, unless these form the compost of deeper exploration or revelation, seeking insight into my condition, not simply its description. A journal, therefore, is often more complex and difficult than a diary, far less personal in depictions of daily fortune, using everyday experiences as a stepstool (at the least) to peer beyond the walls of psychological enclosure. I did not choose the journal form to mask the personal, to belittle or avoid it, but to reflect my most intimate assessment of the personal as contributing to something greater: comprehension. It is not enough merely to record the frustrations, joys or barriers of living, without appraising these for what they represent and suggest, where we learn not merely reiterate. The ideal criteria of selection and discrimination apply not only to one ́s journal, but to life as well, adding a mythological drama and perspective that immersion alone does not permit. In some ways, journalizing is similar in impulse to the pastoral ethos or motif familiar in contemplative writing from Virgil to Thoreau: one withdraws from active society, toward natural or rural settings, in search of some form of respite, then returns to tell of their discoveries. Some critics have seen this as the organizing design of most North American fables--in fact, as the American mythology, seeking to heal the serious schism between our natural psyche and its more devastated environment; that is, a search for a middle ground (or via media) between the primitive and the technologically complex. This volume of journal selections resembles that motif, focusing on the withdrawal phase of a generally recuperative metaphysical cycle. Such solitude is intentional, a critical phase in the live/withdraw/live-again cycle of spiritual refreshment. A recuperative isolation can be experienced daily, if one is discriminating in how their time is spent, but is usually gained more intensely over long, purposefully reclusive periods. The motivations for my withdrawal were several, perhaps the strongest a propensity (as described of another Irish writer) for being nearly overcome by the variety of life. If not overcome, certainly fatigued by events in and of themselves. A reflective silence seemed essential to examine the roots of this propensity. An ideal of pure time, free of most distractions (human or otherwise), was also necessary for writing of the sort that interested me, the personally contemplative or mystical. Only through such reflection could I ever achieve a meaningful connection with the more active life that surrounded me. The predominant experience of solitude--especially in a society where the value of withdrawal is suspect or sporadic--is the figurative isolation one experiences throughout the entire cycle of withdrawal and re-emergence. It is generally difficult for lovers of action to comprehend this attraction to non-doing. One of the aims of solitude is to reunite philosophy and religion, or rather philosophy and awe, to not accept the social impoverishment of these universal needs for knowledge and worship. The asceticism of retreat was not solely the traditional and philosophical appeal of simplicity, but the freedom from income-producing and time-consuming work it permitted. For the solitary, however, an ideal of pure time must be united with an ideal of intimate association, if the mystical quest is to be emotionally as wel
Download or read book Lovely Lonely Life a Woman s Village Journal 1973 1982 Volume I written by Mary Kelly Black and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2007-10-22 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These journal entries comprise two volumes of selections (Vol. I, 1973-1982, Vol. II, 1983-2003). Volume I includes an Introduction and some biographical memories. As Stephane Mallarme considered literature the antithesis of journalism, a journal is often the antithesis of a diary. It is of less interest to record moods and events, or barriers to self-realization, than to have ideas and insights about these. As a journal-keeper, I am generally disinterested in diurnal details, unless these form the compost of deeper exploration or revelation, seeking insight into my condition, not simply its description. A journal, therefore, is often more complex and difficult than a diary, far less personal in depictions of daily fortune, using everyday experiences as a stepstool (at the least) to peer beyond the walls of psychological enclosure. I did not choose the journal form to mask the personal, to belittle or avoid it, but to reflect my most intimate assessment of the personal as contributing to something greater: comprehension. It is not enough merely to record the frustrations, joys or barriers of living, without appraising these for what they represent and suggest, where we learn not merely reiterate. The ideal criteria of selection and discrimination apply not only to ones journal, but to life as well, adding a mythological drama and perspective that immersion alone does not permit. In some ways, journalizing is similar in impulse to the pastoral ethos or motif familiar in contemplative writing from Virgil to Thoreau: one withdraws from active society, toward natural or rural settings, in search of some form of respite, then returns to tell of their discoveries. Some critics have seen this as the organizing design of most North American fables--in fact, as the American mythology, seeking to heal the serious schism between our natural psyche and its more devastated environment; that is, a search for a middle ground (or via media) between the primitive and the technologically complex. This volume of journal selections resembles that motif, focusing on the withdrawal phase of a generally recuperative metaphysical cycle. Such solitude is intentional, a critical phase in the live/withdraw/live-again cycle of spiritual refreshment. A recuperative isolation can be experienced daily, if one is discriminating in how their time is spent, but is usually gained more intensely over long, purposefully reclusive periods. The motivations for my withdrawal were several, perhaps the strongest a propensity (as described of another Irish writer) for being nearly overcome by the variety of life. If not overcome, certainly fatigued by events in and of themselves. A reflective silence seemed essential to examine the roots of this propensity. An ideal of pure time, free of most distractions (human or otherwise), was also necessary for writing of the sort that interested me, the personally contemplative or mystical. Only through such reflection could I ever achieve a meaningful connection with the more active life that surrounded me. The predominant experience of solitude--especially in a society where the value of withdrawal is suspect or sporadic--is the figurative isolation one experiences throughout the entire cycle of withdrawal and re-emergence. It is generally difficult for lovers of action to comprehend this attraction to non-doing. One of the aims of solitude is to reunite philosophy and religion, or rather philosophy and awe, to not accept the social impoverishment of these universal needs for knowledge and worship. The asceticism of retreat was not solely the traditional and philosophical appeal of simplicity, but the freedom from income-producing and time-consuming work it permitted. For the solitary, however, an ideal of pure time must be united with an ideal of intimate association, if the mystical quest is to be emotionally as well a
Download or read book The Lonely Life written by Bette Davis and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1962, The Lonely Life is legendary silver screen actress Bette Davis's lively and riveting account of her life, loves, and marriages--now in ebook for the first time, and updated with an afterword she wrote just before her death. As Davis says in the opening lines of her classic memoir: "I have always been driven by some distant music--a battle hymn, no doubt--for I have been at war from the beginning. I rode into the field with sword gleaming and standard flying. I was going to conquer the world." A bold, unapologetic book by a unique and formidable woman, The Lonely Life details the first fifty-plus years of Davis's life--her Yankee childhood, her rise to stardom in Hollywood, the birth of her beloved children, and the uncompromising choices she made along the way to succeed. The book was updated with new material in the 1980s, bringing the story up to the end of Davis's life--all the heartbreak, all the drama, and all the love she experienced at every stage of her extraordinary life. The Lonely Life proves conclusively that the legendary image of Bette Davis is not a fable but a marvelous reality.
Download or read book The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll written by Jean Nathan and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2013-05-17 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A glamorous, haunted life unfolds in the mesmerizing biography of the woman behind a classic children's book In 1957, a children's book called The Lonely Doll was published. With its pink-and-white-checked cover and photographs featuring a wide-eyed doll, it captured the imaginations of young girls and made the author, Dare Wright, a household name. Close to forty years after its publication, the book was out of print but not forgotten. When the cover image inexplicably came to journalist Jean Nathan one afternoon, she went in search of the book-and ultimately its author. Nathan found Dare Wright living out her last days in a decrepit public hospital in Queens, New York. Over the next five years, Nathan pieced together a glamorous life. Blond, beautiful Wright had begun her career as an actress and model and then turned to fashion photography before stumbling upon her role as bestselling author. But there was a dark side to the story: a brother lost in childhood, ill-fated marriage plans, a complicated, controlling mother. Edith Stevenson Wright, herself a successful portrait painter, played such a dominant role in her daughter's life that Dare was never able to find her way into the adult world. Only through her work could she speak for herself: in her books she created the happy family she'd always yearned for, while her self-portraits betrayed an unresolved tension between sexuality and innocence, a desire to belong and painful isolation. Illustrated with stunning photographs, The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll tells the unforgettable story of a woman who, imprisoned by her childhood, sought to set herself free through art.
Download or read book The Lonely City written by Olivia Laing and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is a particular flavor to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by thousands of strangers. This roving cultural history of urban loneliness centers on the ultimate city: Manhattan, that teeming island of gneiss, concrete, and glass. How do we connect with other people, particularly if our sexuality or physical body is considered deviant or damaged? Does technology draw us closer together or trap us behind screens? Laing travels deep into the work and lives of some of the century's most original artists in a celebration of the state of loneliness.
Download or read book It s a Lonely Love written by Hunter Summerall and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cataloguing the rise and fall of an ill-fated relationship, It's a Lonely Love explores the vulnerability one must feel before moving on from a lost love. Styled as entries from a journal, Hunter Summerall’s poetry takes the personal and constructs a universal story about unrequited love and anguish.
Download or read book A Life Less Lonely written by Nick Duerden and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The practical advice in this book is gold dust not only for lonely people, but for those who long to help them.' - Joanna Lumley Loneliness is an epidemic on the rise. It has long been documented that older people suffer from social isolation, but teenagers do too, likewise new parents, those with disability or illness, and anybody going through a significant life change. As more people work full-time, and we interact via social media rather than face-to-face, we need to stop and ask ourselves: what can we do to ensure all our futures are more connected and socially satisfying? This book will help to share stories of loneliness to increase our empathy and understanding of it, and to look for possible solutions. Using the research the Jo Cox Commission undertook following the MP's senseless death in 2016, it offers a wealth of practical advice: how to spot the symptoms in yourself and in others; how to ease them; how to seek help and, ultimately, how to understand this most fundamental of human emotions. Its aim is simple: to provide us all with the tools we need to lead kinder, more connected lives.
Download or read book The Opposite of Loneliness written by Marina Keegan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The instant New York Times bestseller and publishing phenomenon: Marina Keegan’s posthumous collection of award-winning essays and stories “sparkles with talent, humanity, and youth” (O, The Oprah Magazine). Marina Keegan’s star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at The New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Marina left behind a rich, deeply expansive trove of writing that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation. Her short story “Cold Pastoral” was published on NewYorker.com. Her essay “Even Artichokes Have Doubts” was excerpted in the Financial Times, and her book was the focus of a Nicholas Kristof column in The New York Times. Millions of her contemporaries have responded to her work on social media. As Marina wrote: “We can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over…We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.” The Opposite of Loneliness is an unforgettable collection of Marina’s essays and stories that articulates the universal struggle all of us face as we figure out what we aspire to be and how we can harness our talents to impact the world. “How do you mourn the loss of a fiery talent that was barely a tendril before it was snuffed out? Answer: Read this book. A clear-eyed observer of human nature, Keegan could take a clever idea...and make it something beautiful” (People).
Download or read book Never Be Lonely Again written by Pat Love and published by Health Communications, Inc.. This book was released on 2011-02 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents advice for overcoming loneliness and isolation, discussing how to foster personal connections, find meaningful work, become part of a community, help those in need, and develop long-lasting relationships.
Download or read book The Trip to Echo Spring written by Olivia Laing and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were so many authors of the greatest works of literature consumed by alcoholism? In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing takes a journey across America, examining the links between creativity and drink in the overlapping work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. From Hemingway's Key West to Williams's New Orleans, Laing pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, and strips away the tangle of mythology to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.
Download or read book Loneliness as a Way of Life written by Thomas Dumm and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds. A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower. Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.
Download or read book Live Alone And Like It written by Marjorie Hillis and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE BEST SELLING NOVEL WHICH CREATED A WORLDWIDE PHENOMENON 'A perfect bedside companion for the post-Bridget Jones generation' DAILY TELEGRAPH (CANADA) 'Hillis's book gave rise to 'Live Alone' accessories, including cocktail shakers, china dogs and negligees' WALL STREET JOURNAL 'She was boldly leading a vanguard of young women into a self-reliant, judgment-free future' NATIONAL This 1936 bestseller sold over 100,000 copies in the first two months of its release. Marjorie Hillis, a 1930s Vogue editor, provides a stylish, no-nonsense guide to living and loving single life. Written with wisdom, humour and panache, this is advice that will never go out of fashion. She takes women through the fundamentals of living alone by showing them how to create a welcoming environment and cultivate home-friendly hobbies, 'for no woman can accept an invitation every night without coming to grief.' 'Chances are that at sometime in your life, possibly only now and then between husbands, you will find yourself settling down to a solitary existence. You may do it from choice. Lots of people do ... Whether you view your one-woman menage as Doom or Adventure (and whether you are twenty-six or sixty-six), you need a plan.' Who can resist a book with chapters such as 'A Lady and Her Liquor', 'Pleasures of a Single Bed' and 'Solitary Refinement'? Live Alone and Like It is sure to appeal to live-aloners' and those considering taking the plunge. With beautiful and stylish line drawings by a Vogue illustrator.
Download or read book The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman written by Denis Theriault and published by Oneworld. This book was released on 2017-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bilodo lives a solitary daily life, routinely completing his post round every day and returning to his empty Montreal apartment. But he has found a way to break the cycle - Bilodo has taken to stealing people's mail, steaming open the envelopes and reading the letters inside. And so it is he comes across Segolene's letters. She is corresponding with Gaston, a master poet, and their letters are each composed of only three lines. They are writing each other haikus. The simplicity and elegance of their poems move Bilado and he begins to fall in love with her. But one day, out on his round, he witnesses a terrible and tragic accident. Just as Gaston is walking up to the post-box to mail his next haiku to Segolene, he is hit by a car and dies on the side of the road. And so Bilodo makes an extraordinary decision - he will impersonate Gaston and continue to write to Segolene under this guise. But how long can the deception continue for?
Download or read book Sex and the Single Girl written by Helen Gurley Brown and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-07-10 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1962 blockbuster that took on “one of the most absurd (if universal) myths of our time: that every girl must be married” (The New York Times). Helen Gurley Brown, the iconic editor in chief of Cosmopolitan for thirty-two years, is considered one of the most influential figures of Second Wave feminism. Her first book sold millions of copies, became a cultural phenomenon, and ushered in a whole new way of thinking about work, men, and life. Feisty, fun, and totally frank, Sex and the Single Girl offers advice to unmarried women that is as relevant today as it was when it burst onto the scene in the 1960s. This spirited manifesto puts women—and what they want—first. It captures the exuberance, optimism, and independence that have influenced the lives of so many contemporary American women.
Download or read book Hola Papi written by John Paul Brammer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The popular LGBTQ advice columnist and writer presents a memoir-in-essays chronicling his journey growing up as a queer, mixed-race kid in America's heartland to becoming the "Chicano Carrie Bradshaw" of his generation.
Download or read book The Girl from the Garden written by Parnaz Foroutan and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary new writer makes her literary debut with this suspenseful novel of desire, obsession, power and vulnerability, in which a crisis of inheritance leads to the downfall of a wealthy family of Persian Jews in early twentieth-century Iran. For all his wealth and success, Asher Malacouti—the head of a prosperous Jewish family living in the Iranian town of Kermanshah—cannot have the one thing he desires above all: a male son. His young wife Rakhel, trapped in an oppressive marriage at a time when a woman’s worth is measured by her fertility, is made desperate by her failure to conceive, and grows jealous and vindictive. Her despair is compounded by her sister-in-law Khorsheed’s pregnancy and her husband’s growing desire for Kokab, his cousin’s wife. Frustrated by his wife’s inability to bear him an heir, Asher makes a fateful choice that will shatter the household and drive Rakhel to dark extremes to save herself and preserve her status within the family. Witnessed through the memories of the family’s only surviving daughter, Mahboubeh, now an elderly woman living in Los Angeles, The Girl from the Garden unfolds the complex, tragic history of her family in a long-lost Iran of generations past. Haunting, suspenseful and inspired by events in the author’s own family, it is an evocative and poignant exploration of sacrifice, betrayal, and the indelible legacy of the families that forge us.
Download or read book Married But Lonely written by David E. Clarke and published by Charisma Media. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dr. David Clarke provides seven steps that you can implement to begin to experience the kind of marriage you've always wanted.
