In such melancholy...
Edward Hopper is the painter of loss, melancholic geometry, post-coital pallor, pre-dawn presentiment, tremor of the needle. More than any otrher painter he portrays not only abstract loneliness but The Loneliness of Shape. I encountered Hopper’s work as a young man working several jobs while holding on to my college career by the skin of my teeth. His paintings expressed for me the pre-dawn Manhattan with which I was so familiar. It was a city beyond remorse, a city that had entered into a kind of holding pattern in which something was about to happen which would be neither good nor bad but would express the arrangement and coincidences of our atoms in the cosmos. A stoic city. My understanding of Stoicism then was poor; I had not yet grasped its central theme, which is that our purpose in life is to do good. If I had grasped that theme in Hopper’s New York I would have asked myself, What is it that I’m not doing as the sun rises over the East River and floods the cross streets? I did not dislike Hopper’s New York. Indeed I was glad, very glad, that someone had expressed it definitively. But could I bear its melancholy? Could I retain my appetite for life? In old age I ask myself that question again.