Carpe Diem?

Over the years, I’d spent time with Tommy Wilhelm, but it was only over this past weekend that I recognized in him a deep kinship of sadness. I should point out that Tommy and I are outwardly very different. He’s fifteen years younger, a failed actor, has a family life that’s a tragic mess, and speculates in commodities with the last of his money under the spell of a ludicrous man he knows to be a liar and a con artist. He also lives on the Upper West Side during the mid 1950’s and was born not of man and woman but from the imagination of Saul Bellow who breathed life into him through the pages of the novella, “Seize the Day.”

In our lives we tend to spend time with people who we share a functional bond with. Our families of course. Our friends and acquaintances who we’ve met through some shared association, whether former classmates, fellow parents at our children’s school, neighbors, colleagues at work, a common sport or hobby, a political passion, or, more rarely, a mutual admiration of gifts of character and intellect.

But how many people in our lives ever let us see their true inner fears and vulnerabilities? How often do we?  All of us, by instinct and self-preservation, prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet.

“Seize the Day” is the advice given to Tommy Wilhelm by Dr. Tamkin, his parasitic investing guru and false friend, as they go to the brokerage firm where Tommy will lose all his money. The novella takes place over the course of a single day, but its title of Seize the Day is a mockery, because what dominates Tommy’s inner thoughts and drags him down are regrets for his past mistakes and dread of his loveless, hopeless future. He’s separated from his wife and children who he cannot support and from his mistress who he cannot marry. He lives in a residential hotel on Broadway with his cruel, disappointed, unsupportive, unyielding father. His mother is dead and he’s estranged from his sister.

Tommy is filled with sorrow and self-pity, traits that would normally repel. But Bellow saves Tommy from repulsion by stripping away from him any pretext and artifice and thereby giving to both Tommy and the reader a radical clarity and honesty about Tommy’s life. We’re allowed to see deep into him and we see someone who knows he’s terribly lost, who blames only himself for his situation, and who has deep reserves of pity not only for himself but for others as well.

After he’s lost every penny, the novella ends with Tommy seeking shelter in a funeral home where a dead man, a stranger, lies in an open coffin. The sight of the dead man breaks the dam of Tommy’s sadness and he begins to cry “with all his heart.”

Here’s the last paragraph of the novella.

“The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in [Tommy’s] blind, wet eyes, the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.”

What is “deeper than sorrow” and the “heart’s ultimate need?” To me, it’s loneliness and the desperate need for connection. In the funeral parlor, Tommy finally finds a shared connection of loneliness with a dead stranger, for who can be more alone than the dead?  This connection with the dead man, fellow sufferer of loneliness, provides  an outlet for Tommy to express pity for someone other than himself.

It’s this sense of terrible loneliness that connected me to Tommy. For if you have ever suffered times of acute loneliness in your life–––for me during certain periods of my childhood­­–––that feeling can haunt you forever. A phantom that can appear any time you feel disconnected from the world.

Many of my business trips triggered that loneliness. Sitting alone at night in my hotel room waiting to meet strangers the next day, questioning whether the point of the trip was anything other than an imposed exile from my family. Or, even now, I can feel that pang of loneliness if I’m alone in my apartment for even a day or two. Yes, it’s an echo of a feeling from the past, but it’s a strong echo nevertheless and can summon forth those childhood feelings, made stronger by the deeper sensitivity one often acquires as they get older. For as a child, I never said to myself, “I’m lonely,” but instead distracted myself with games against imaginary opponents. That was to protect myself. To put up a shield against feelings that were too painful for me to handle as a child.

But there is an upside to being haunted by involuntary memories of acute loneliness. One seeks to battle that loneliness by caring about and healing the misfortunes of others. In doing so, we establish the connections we seek and practice the virtue of empathy, circumscribed, as all empathy must be, by one’s own life experiences.  

Tommy, even knowing nothing about the life of the dead man, had empathy for the man’s final aloneness and separation from all of living humanity.

And so, this particular re-reading of “Seize the Day” connected me to Tommy in a way that previous readings had never done. Why it clicked this time is a mystery. Maybe as I’ve gotten older, my emotional guard has become a more lackluster sentry.

Reading the book and feeling that kinship of sadness with Tommy provoked feelings of loneliness in me. And so perhaps this post is my attempt to exorcise or expel those feelings.

I recommend reading “Seize the Day,”but it’s a dense book and will not be to everyone’s tastes. So I included below a song that always moved me, because I realize now that it captures loneliness with a beautiful melody and piercing lyrics.

Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” performed on the very first SNL show in October 1975.