Loneliness as a room

Loneliness tonight isn't a feeling -- it's a place. Dickinson maps the architecture of solitude in eight lines. Laing walks through New York City alone and discovers that loneliness has its own geography, its own landmarks. Hemingway puts an old man in a cafe late at night and lets the silence do most of the talking. Each writer treats aloneness as something with shape and dimension. The question is whether any of them think you can leave.