Photographer unknown, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, and Emma Goldman, circa 1930. Edit: upon calculation, this joyous trio is unlikely, unfortunately for my romantic spirit. Rosa would be 59, Simone 22 and Emma 61, even the genes of heroes can’t be this fortuitous, sigh. Thank you for pointing this out.
Three extraordinary women serendipitously embodying three places I call home.
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Solitude is a problem for writers generally, who spend so much time alone rehearsing a form of ideal communication. And men —as a practical matter — are often worse at being alone than women. But for male writers, however often an appearance of self-sufficiency can be stripped away to reveal a hidden structure of support, there is a writerly tradition of solitude that has existed at least since Romanticism: Rousseau’s “my habits are those of solitude and not of men,” or Shelley’s “Alastor; or, the Spirit of Solitude.” A man who chooses to be alone assumes the glamour of his forebears. A woman’s aloneness makes us suspicious: Even today it carries connotations of reluctance and abandonment, on the one hand, and selfishness and disobedience, on the other.
Emily Cooke, The Lonely Ones, for The New Inquiry, May 2012. Via.
fette confirms my suspicions: i’m 99% sure none of these women are rosa luxembourg, simone de beauvoir or emma goldman. i’m pretty sure i would have recognized at least emma goldman, and if this meeting ever did happen that there would have been more context online. INTERNET CITE YOUR SOURCES YOU BASTARDS.
Rosa Luxemburg was murdered in 1919.
But whoever they are, I love the pipes.
