Word: loners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mother and an Algerian father who left the family when his son was seven, Lepine studied intermittently at junior colleges and expressed the hope that he would be accepted at the university. Though he had no history of criminal behavior or mental illness, he existed on the margins; a loner who enjoyed war movies, he was unable to sustain relationships with women and claimed to have been turned down by the military for being "asocial...
...loner by temperament and circumstance -- his family was constantly relocating from one drab Piedmont town to another -- Price describes the boy he was as "a born witness or spy . . . helplessly fascinated by the ritual power of language." In Clear Pictures he comes across as a precocious Dixie dandy, worrying earnestly about God and masturbation, and toadying up to visiting artistes like the great contralto Marian Anderson by sending them portraits he had sketched from publicity stills...
...what his detractors claimed: a self-aggrandizing charlatan. But he took no pleasure in his notoriety; he ran from it. The Selected Letters adds another interpretation to an already overwrought tale. The age demanded a hero, Lawrence qualified, and the 20th century then got what it deserved: a loner, an ascetic, a man who might have been happier as a medieval monk than as the public cynosure he became. No paragon in his own eyes, Lawrence nonetheless remains a haunting presence in the contemporary consciousness, an indissoluble mixture of weaknesses and strength...
...Goya is that for the past hundred years and more, he has been somewhat obscured by the Goyaesque. Our idea of him has been so much shaped by the Romantic sensibility that pervaded Europe after his death that we still like to see him as a death-haunted, irrational loner, pitted by his - temperament against his times -- the first skeptic of art, the titanic ancestor of surrealism. "It is when Goya abandons himself to his capacity for fantasy that he is most admirable," wrote Theophile Gautier in 1842. "No one can equal him in making black clouds, filled with vampires...
...removed from the streets, and that what the public needs is a shot of romantic realism. T.S. Eliot was a civil man, and a public-minded writer, and so it is only right that his anniversary be marked in public ceremonies; Chandler was the laureate of the loner, and so his admirers recall him now in quieter ways, alone, unnoticed, with a light on in their darker corners...