Famous loners thread.

[bemildred]

I'll start: Emily Dickinson

http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/

[FarLeftRage]

1. Greta Garbo

"I vant to be alone!"

[Stardust]

27. I hear what she really meant was, I want to be left alone. IOW no

papparazi.

[Gryffindor_Bookworm]

2. oooh! Good one!

Dickinson rocks. :D

[kaitykaity]

3. Howard Hughes?

Not sure if he was a loner or just a nut.

:shrug:

[bemildred]

4. Maybe both. Certainly a nut.

And clearly a recluse in his old age.

[bemildred]

5. Henry David Thoreau. nt

[RushIsRot]

36. Thoreau was hardly a loner. He appreciated his solitude, but if

you are speaking of his time in the cabin at Walden Pond, that only lasted for a period of two years, two months and two days. HDT most often lived in the home of his parents. That is also where he died in 1862. During the Walden years, he made frequent visits to town.

He had friends with whom he shared experiences. He taught school. He helped to run the family pencil business, including sales trips. He proposed marriage to a woman at least once. Henry was not the hermit that many believe.

[bemildred]

37. I was speaking of whether he was an introvert or not.

Introverts are not necessarily, or even usually, hermits. See some of the others listed here. But if it suits you to think he was the gregarious sort, that is fine.

[RushIsRot]

38. OK, I'll agree that HDT was seldom the life of the party, but the OP

which you originated was entitled "Famous Loners Thread."

If you'd care to read more about Thoreau, I'd suggest, THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, by Walter Harding. It is available from Dover.

[bemildred]

40. So we have a problem with nomenclature.

I equate "loner" with introvert. This is the "loners" group. You apparently equate it with being a hermit or something like that. I will happily agree that HDT was not a hermit.

I've read Walden and Week on the Concord & Merrimac Rivers, "Civil Disobedience", some other things. I like his thinking, but his prose drives me nuts.

Edit: I offer you in exchange this title: "Party of One -- The Loner's Manifesto" by Anneli Rufus.

[RushIsRot]

41. Thanks for the book title. I'll look for it next time I visit the local

library.

Quite honestly, I was unaware that DU had Loner's Group. I frequently refer to myself in that manner. I have come to treasure my solitude in my waning years.

Having said that, I have also enjoyed our exchange. Nice to make your acquaintance.

[bemildred]

42. My pleasure.

You sound like a "loner" to me.
:hi:

[phrigndumass]

43. "Party of One" ... Great book!

Hi bemildred ... Thanks for pointing out this book. I read it, I enjoyed it, it became useful to me. (sort of like "I laughed, I cried, it became a part of me")

:hi:

[bemildred]

44. Yah.

"Fuck, you mean I'm not broken?"

[phrigndumass]

45. LOL!

Ironically, it IS socially acceptable.

[RushIsRot]

39. OK, I'll agree that HDT was seldom the life of the party, but the OP

which you initiated was entitled "Famous Loners Thread."

If you'd care to read more about Thoreau, I'd suggest, THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU, by Walter Harding. It is available from Dover.

[chaska]

6. How about a non-famous one?

Nick Grindstaff (cool name, huh?). As a young man, sometime in the 1800s, he left his native Virginia in pursuit of California gold. While there he met and fell in love with a young woman. The woman died.

Grindstaff left California and lived the rest of his days alone on a cold mountaintop. I spent some time there at his graveside (the Appalachian Trail passes right by it). His gravestone says, "Born Alone, Suffered Alone, Died Alone". I left a few tears for the old fella.

I try not to romanticize being alone. I view it, despite its benefits, as a condition in need of healing.

On edit:

Well, I'll be damned, he is famous. Found this:

Nick Grindstaff (1851-1923) was a hermit ("they say he went to Harvard University, and then took to drink after his ladylove died out West") and lived on the mountain for over 40 years, with an old horse and a dog or two.

Other reports have it that he had no friends except a pet rattlesnake, which was killed eventually by passersby who thought they were doing him a favor.

The people who buried Nick Grindstaff had to kill Nick's dog to get near the body, because the dog was protecting it. The dog was buried with Nick.

The citizen who kept the general store down in Shady Valley, Tennessee, where Uncle would buy his meal and bacon twice a year, wrote the words. Somebody had to. Nick Grindstaff was a special man, with a story no one ever quite knew.

Now with pictures: http://www.mce.k12tn.net/johnson/legends/nick.htm

[bemildred]

7. OK. How about Burro Schmidt?

The tunnel averages six feet high and ten feet wide, but, some areas vary greatly. In areas where very colorful ore can be seen, indicitive of copper.gold,iron,and silver, it might be ten feet high and ten feet wide. Burro Schmidt occasionally cut his dynamite fuses too short . This resulted in a fast blast, not giving him time to escape. He was trapped many times by falling rock and injured as many times. Making his way to a neighbor's cabin, wiping the dust and dirt and the blood he was heard to exclaim, again and again, "It almost got me this time"! He eventually laid rails for an ore car, which he pushed by hand the full length of the tunnel full of rock for years and years. The tunnel runs straight for many yards,then takes a slight turn for about 1800 feet. At this point he made a 90 degree turn to the left. After about 300 feet he came back to the turning point and decided to turn to the right and proceed digging. After about another couple hundred feet of digging and blasting and hauling rock for approximately 2200 feet, Burro Schmidt saw the light at the end of the tunnel. He had made his way out of the mountain on the south side. Where he had originally planned to carry his ore out of the tunnel and down to Mojave for assaying. Another forty miles of dirt travel, but this never came to pass. He was now up on the side of a very steep mountain with no way down to the valley but to climb. After thirty two years of tunneling he had dug through nearly 2500 feet of solid granite, using only a pick, a shovel, and a four pound hammer. The tunnel gets smaller and smaller at the end. But, so did Burro Schmidt, his photos indicate that he was getting shorter in heighth as he grew older.

The tunnel maintains an average temperature of 68 degrees winter and summer. Jack lived to be 21 and Jenny died at 25 years of age. Burro Schmidt used a kerosene lamp to light the tunnel. When he had no kerosene he used a two cent candle. In the summertime he worked on a local ranch to get money for his grub stake and mining supplies. His diet consisted of beans,rice,bacon,fish chowder, boiled onions, sardines and lots of whiskey. We have visited his cabin,which stands intact,as he left it. Newspaper and cardboard cover the ceiling for insulation, from the turn of the century. His clothes were made of flour sacks. His overalls were patched with gunny sacks. His shoes were soled with tin can lids nailed on to a worn out sole. He lived another sixteen years as the proud proprietor of a tourist attraction called "Burro Schmidt's tunnel".

http://www.deathvalleyhostel.com/burschmidtun.html

A pic:

http://digital-desert.com/burro-schmidt-tunnel/

I walked the tunnel once, some time ago now.

[bemildred]

8. Joe DiMaggio. nt

[shenmue]

33. That surprises me a little...

:) Hmm. Learn something every day.

[LWolf]

9. Beatrix Potter

She spent more time with animals than people growing up; they eventually became the characters in her stories.

[NJCher]

16. you have just named the only "other" life I'd like to have

I visited Beatrix Potter's home when I was in England. What beautiful gardening! She was married to a lawyer.

When I think about other peoples' lives, the only one that appeals to me the same or more than my own is that of Beatrix Potter.


Cher

[bemildred]

10. John McAbery:

KING RANGE NATIONAL CONSERVATION AREA, Calif. — John McAbery's sinuous wood sculptures would not exist without the lonely stretch of wind-blasted beach where he staked out a home nearly three decades ago. Neither would John McAbery. Not as the man he has come to be.

McAbery has plied many trades over the years: builder, restaurateur, maker of sheepskin coats. ("The first one was really ugly. But because it was the '60s, somebody bought it off me.") In nearly all pursuits, he was self-taught. And so it went with sculpting.

The 60-year-old recluse with a thick shock of gray hair and dancing eyes never imagined he'd make a living from art.

But 11 years after McAbery crafted a crude spoon from a chunk of driftwood, his sculptures sell for more than $3,000 to upscale woodworking galleries in Seattle and Santa Fe, N.M., as well as to a growing list of private collectors.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mcabery31jan31,1,1844238.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

[AgadorSparticus]

11. David Letterman

[American Tragedy]

12. J.D. Salinger, Barry Bonds, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Kim Basinger

J.D. Salinger kind of takes it to a new level. I don't know if anybody has seen him outside of his house in forty years.

[bemildred]

13. Salinger is a noteworthy addition, and the others. nt

[Drum]

28. Thank goodness!

For years now I've been hoping for some commonality with Kim Basinger! ;)

[bemildred]

14. Robert Burton -- Author of "The Anatomy of Melancholy"

http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~rlblair/burton.html

I have the Everyman's Library edition, which I recommend.

[onager]

15. How about a couple of Nobel winners?

Nobel Prizes in medicine:

1983
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992 ), American
Work: Discovered transposable ("jumping") genes in maize

McClintock won the Nobel 32 years after her most important discovery. Her work was ignored by scientific colleagues, who described her as "crazy" and "an old bag who'd been hanging around (the laboratory) for years".

That genes occupied fixed positions was an absolute truth, until McClintock shattered that absolute in 1951 with her discovery of moving genes. She is a complicated and fascinating woman, whom even the Nobel committee described as a "loner."

1986
Rita Levi-Montelcini (1909- ), Italian-American
Work: Co-winner, fundamental studies of cell growth

Levi-Montelcini's old-fashioned father thought school was no place for women, and she had to fight for her two medical degrees.

Perhaps in revenge, she never married and moved in with her twin sister Paola, an artist.

Levi-Montelcini was an Italian Jew who suffered Nazi persecution during WWII. She moved to the U.S. in 1947 and became a citizen in 1956.

[StrongbadTehAwesome]

17. If I remember right, the latest Nobel winner for literature

had someone else accept her prize for her, because she rarely leaves her house.

[bemildred]

18. Kurt Goedel

In 1931 the mathematician and logician Kurt Godel proved that within a formal system questions exist that are neither provable nor disprovable on the basis of the axioms that define the system. This is known as Godel's Undecidability Theorem. He also showed that in a sufficiently rich formal system in which decidability of all questions is required, there will be contradictory statements. This is known as his Incompleteness Theorem.

In establishing these theorems Godel showed that there are problems that cannot be solved by any set of rules or procedures; instead for these problems one must always extend the set of axioms. This disproved a common belief at the time that the different branches of mathematics could be integrated and placed on a single logical foundation.

---

More recently, Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician working at IBM, has stressed that Godel's and Turing's results set fundamental limits on mathematics.

These results, along with quantum uncertainty and the unpredictability of determinstic (chaotic) systems, form a core set of limitations to scientific knowledge that have only come to be appreciated during this century.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/complexity/CompLexicon/godel.html

Another, more detailed biography:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Godel.html

[Emops]

19. Neil Peart, drummer for Rush.

Rides his motorcycle alone for weeks, sometimes months, at a time.

[bemildred]

20. I used to be fond of motorcycle camping when I was younger.

A great way to see things and a discipline all it's own.

[hippiechick]

21. Wittgenstein

n/t

[bemildred]

22. I call your Wittgenstein and raise you a Nietzsche. nt

[hippiechick]

23. Eeek !

All my notes from The Loner's Manifesto are at home ! I can't remember anyone else !!

(But that book is SO spot on for both me AND HippieKid)


:hi:

[CBHagman]

24. The actress Miranda Richardson.

[Kire]

25. Bruce Wayne

He's famous.

[raccoon]

26. (Nelle) Harper Lee. I've been reading MOCKINGBIRD and sounds

like, while she had some friends, such as Truman Capote, she was basically a loner.

[Nay]

29. Wasn't Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) a loner?

[Oddball]

30. Bad Loner Joke

Two Hermits were having a party. Because they are Hermits, they are the only ones there. One turns to the other and says, "Are You Having a Good Time?"

The other says, "Yes, but I'd be having an even better time if you weren't here."

Okay, that was bad.

Another famous Loner? The Lone Gunman.

Okay, that was bad too.

Hey, I'm just trying to be one of the guy.

I'm stopping now.

[tainted_chimp]

31. I liked the 2 hermits joke!

T'was cute.

:hi:

[bemildred]

34. Hmmmm. Lone Ranger? nt

[shenmue]

32. Morrissey

"I begin my day with the goal of avoiding people."

:)

[Catsbrains]

35. Isaac Newton nt.

[Cetacea]

46. Syd (Pink Floyd) Barrett, the ultimate loner

Sorry that I posted a dedicated thread in memory of him. I came across this post after wards.
Spent virtually years without a visitor save his sister. Created many paintings but would photograph them then destroy them.

A forum for dedicated Barrett aficionados: http://www.latenightdiscussion.com/

[enigmatic]

47. Bukowski

His words kept me alive for many, many years in my own solo journey: