At the Center of All Beauty
Solitude and the Creative Life
-
-
3.7 • 3 Ratings
-
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A treasure that I didn’t know I was looking for.” —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Angel of History
Fenton Johnson’s lyrical prose and searching sensibility explore what it means to choose solitude and to celebrate the notion that solitude is a legitimate and dignified calling. He delves into the lives and works of nearly a dozen iconic solitaries he considers his kindred spirits, from Thoreau at Walden Pond and Emily Dickenson in Amherst, to the fiercely self-protective Zora Neale Hurston. The bright wakes these figures have left behind illuminate Fenton Johnson’s journey from his childhood in rural Kentucky to his solitary travels in America, France, and India. Woven into his musings about better-known solitaries are stories of friends and family he has lost and found along the way.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this stirring memoir and social critique, Johnson (Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays) explores a life of solitude of those who "sit alone writing, painting, or reading, or watching the changing light." A self-described "solitary," Johnson posits that he and other artists who have focused wholly on answering a calling rather than pursuing romantic love constitute a larger "human family." This premise frames Johnson's meditations on how race, celibacy, sexual orientation, or gender identity have informed many a solitary life. He investigates his "affection for being alone" through colorful anecdotes of his "bent" childhood in rural Kentucky and calls his choices to be childless and celibate "a joyous turning inward." Johnson then examines 11 solitaries, including writers Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, as well as jazz singer Nina Simone, who, because of her commitmment to her art, refused to marry the one man she loved. Queerness and solitude, writes Johnson, make many of them "role models for the cultivation of an interior life." Some, he observes, went from longing for a partner to calmly accepting solitude as a gift of destiny, while others, such as Simone, never "seemed to have reached that inner peace." His musings on solitude deliver heady and abstract concepts with engaging clarity.
