"It is misery, you know, unspeakable misery for the man who lives alone and who detests sordid, casual affairs; not old enough to do without women, but not young enough to be able to go and look for one without shame!"
About this Quote
Pirandello aims a spotlight at a humiliating interregnum: the age when desire still has teeth, but the social script for pursuing it has turned punitive. The line works because it refuses the comforting binaries we like to give loneliness. This isn’t the romantic solitude of the artist or the rakish freedom of the bachelor. It’s “unspeakable misery” precisely because the speaker has standards - he “detests sordid, casual affairs” - yet lives in a world where respectable intimacy is gated by youth, money, and reputation. Wanting love without wanting the marketplace of love becomes its own trap.
The cruel pivot is the double bind: “not old enough to do without women, but not young enough...without shame.” Pirandello turns aging into a social accusation. Youth is permitted to be hungry; age is expected to be dignified, which often means emotionally amputated. “Shame” is the real antagonist here, less personal than cultural: a community’s invisible policing of who is allowed to want, and how publicly.
As a playwright steeped in modernity’s unstable identities, Pirandello is also staging the fracture between inner life and public face. The speaker isn’t confessing lust; he’s confessing a fear of appearing ridiculous. That’s classic Pirandellian anxiety: the self as something you feel versus the self as something others read. The sentence’s cramped logic mimics the character’s cornered options, making solitude sound not serene but procedural - a life reduced to what’s permissible.
The cruel pivot is the double bind: “not old enough to do without women, but not young enough...without shame.” Pirandello turns aging into a social accusation. Youth is permitted to be hungry; age is expected to be dignified, which often means emotionally amputated. “Shame” is the real antagonist here, less personal than cultural: a community’s invisible policing of who is allowed to want, and how publicly.
As a playwright steeped in modernity’s unstable identities, Pirandello is also staging the fracture between inner life and public face. The speaker isn’t confessing lust; he’s confessing a fear of appearing ridiculous. That’s classic Pirandellian anxiety: the self as something you feel versus the self as something others read. The sentence’s cramped logic mimics the character’s cornered options, making solitude sound not serene but procedural - a life reduced to what’s permissible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Loneliness |
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