Loneliness... An American Malady分析和总结分析和总结.docxVIP

Loneliness... An American Malady Carson McCullers This city New York -- consider the people in it the eight million of us. An English friend of mine when asked why he lived in New York City said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend‘s desire to be alone the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity. To the spectator, the amateur philosopher, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life the question of identity shares urgency with the need for mild. The baby reaches for his toes, then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him and in the wavering infant eyes there comes a pristine wonder. Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed it is this self consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world in which he finds himself. After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us. In The Member of the Wedding, the lovely 12-year-old girl Frankie Adams articulates this universal need: The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We ex