Art, Bread, Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman

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Today I’m thinking about the connections between art, bread, loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Sharing bread is the way through, out and around the desolation that fuels loneliness. I’m certain of it. Homemade sourdough is magical, as powerful as any therapy.

Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the greatest actors of his generation, who died alone from a heroin overdose in an apartment in upstate New York not far from where he grew up, left behind a woman who loved him and three young children. He was famous, at the top of his game, and I believe terribly lonely. 

He tried to kick his addictions multiple times and yet they dragged him back. If drug use is about masking and numbing emotions, which I believe it is, then Hoffman was clearly a candidate for it. The raw vulnerability he portrayed in every role he ever took on stage and screen came from somewhere deep inside, the source of his greatest triumphs as well as his lonely death at the age of 46.

A piece by Richard Deming posted online in The Paris Review titled So Fierce Is the World: On Loneliness and Philip Seymour Hoffman affected me deeply and this post is in response to that, a working out of his many densely packed ideas. Deming himself works at staying sober and he relates deeply to Hoffman through their shared addictions.

He writes, “The desolation of loneliness, like the connected problems of substance abuse and depression, comes from the feeling that the experience—when one is in it—will never end. That is why, sometimes, people choose to end it for themselves. If we are to keep going, push through, or slip around it, I believe we must reinvent loneliness in order to survive it.”

Loneliness is an emotion and like all emotions it is transient. We don’t have to react to it by lurching towards a bottle or a needle. The trouble is the society we live in tells us that there is something wrong with us for feeling this way, just as it does when grief lasts beyond a funeral or the date a court hands down a divorce decree or a job is gone forever and getting over the loss takes more then a day. So we stuff these feelings deep inside of ourselves rather than expressing them. We start to believe there is something wrong with us and that we must bury the feeling, mask it, deny it to escape it. Trouble is none of these tactics work. Such feelings require physical release, usually words, tears, rituals.

I remember years ago, when I worked at a large organization that prided itself on professionalism and the smartness of its employees, a woman on my team lost her husband to suicide. When she returned to work after a month off and broke down unexpectedly during a meeting, a senior sales manager told her she needed to get over it and move on. Let’s just say he was the one who lost everyone’s respect that day. But his reaction isn’t terribly unusual. We expect people to move on from terrible emotional experiences and get with the program quickly. Why? Because their pain makes us uncomfortable.

There is a difference between indulgence and empathy. It behooves all of us to know where that line lies and to err on the side of kindness more often than not. To deny a person’s humanity is on some level to deny one’s own. It is a way to deny the intimacy that we all need from our friends and family members. Social isolation is the worst feeling in the world for a human being to endure for the simple reason that we are all here for one reason: connection.

Deming references the work of social psychologists who’ve found that society is more likely to express sympathy for depression than loneliness because depression is understood to be a mental illness whereas loneliness is regarded as “emotional neediness” and not worthy of empathy or sympathy. It is indulgent, an excuse for weakness. This attitude is related to the cult of self-sufficiency. It’s a cult because this deep belief is based on a lie. The truth is we need each other.

Art doesn’t lie. Hoffman’s art as an actor brought forward the truth of his very existence and it helped those of us who were his audience. When we watched him on stage or screen we felt something. He made us feel and somehow we became less lonely ourselves. His performances as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman were particularly striking partly because he nailed the role despite being decades younger than the character.

Reflecting on the early days of developing Willy Loman as his tragic subject, Arthur Miller wrote this about Death of Salesman:

“I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch any more. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us.” 

Arthur Miller as quoted by Deming in The Paris Review Online

Loneliness has informed the essence of my identity from my earliest memories as a four-year-old ripped from my Hungarian village and taken to Canada, my “real” home. My parents, suffering themselves for various reasons, were emotionally distant people desperate to take care of themselves and me on their own. I grew up repeating their immigration story over and over again with every move we made, making it impossible to maintain strong emotional bonds with anyone including members of my own extended family.

These days I counter loneliness by engaging in the art of cooking. Food is meant to be shared and sharing it connects me with those around me. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman lives on for us in films. He keeps giving and we keep on receiving the precious intimacy he projected. You and I may not have the opportunity to do that after we’re gone. So, make some bread and give a piece of yourself away to someone you care about. 

I recently hosted a casual dinner for friends, one of whom is gluten intolerant, using three recipes, two of which I’ve linked and provided the recipe for the third below:

Ottolenghi’s Chicken Bake with Corn Batter Topping (GF)

Zucchini Polenta Bread (I made it into muffins) (GF)

Make It Dough’s Chili Cheddar Bread (Not-GF) recipe below.