Strand's Solitude

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)

The recent passing of Mark Strand returned me to his great little book Hopper (1994), a wonderful collection of aesthetic meditations on twenty-three of Edward Hopper’s paintings. So many of Hopper’s pictures – Morning Sun, Automat, Western Motel, Hotel Room, Summer in the City – sway me with their feeling of solitude. Strand identified with them. In Hopper’s concluding piece, he says that the silence of Hopper’s rooms “weighs on us like solitude.” This links with Dan Chiasson’s observation, in his eloquent "Mark Strand's Last Waltz" (“Page-Turner,” newyorker.com, November 30, 2014): “Strand surveyed his outward circumstances—relative health and prosperity, growing fame, the undeniable good fortune of being alive—from a peephole cut into the exterior wall of his solitude.”