Oh dang, we missed Poe’s birthday last week! Still, this is pretty interesting year-round: the whole story annotated with scholarship in JSTOR—free to read and download.
“So much of the pain of loneliness is to do with concealment, with feeling compelled to hide vulnerability, to tuck ugliness away, to cover up scars as if they are literally repulsive. But why hide? What’s so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? Why this need to constantly inhabit peak state, or to be comfortably sealed inside a unit of two, turned inwards from the world at large?”
“Good relationships do take some effort and forbearance. But it shouldn’t take work just to be noticed. Making an emotional connection ought to be the easy part.”
— Lindsey C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980; February 17th, 1970
Text ID: I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall—like seeking love in a whorehouse.
