56 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy DayThe Long Loneliness
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Ideology
In The Long Loneliness, Day and her friends are guided by ideology, whether those beliefs are political, religious, or both. Peter Maurin functions according to many of his own ideologies, including a “green revolution,” and the idea of “cult, culture and cultivation,” which become the theoretical basis of the Catholic Worker Movement. For what they do, ideology is everything, as it is strong and detailed convictions that will allow the movement to succeed. Day often worries that she is not living up to the standards she has set for herself, and spends much of the memoir striving to be the person that fits the lofty expectations that her political and religious beliefs have set for her.
Religion
From a young age, Day had an urge to pray. Though she was not raised in a religious family, she always felt a connection to God and the spiritual. This desire to connect with God is her motivation for much of what she does, from writing about workers’ rights, to helping the poor and destitute, to creating The Catholic Worker Movement, which combined all of her interests and motivations. She does not proselytize, but rather seeks to use her life as an example of one enriched by a religion that does not narrow her views, but expands them, allowing her to follow an ideology along the lines of anarchism, but also one of compassion. Day aspires to become a model Christian through her actions, and viewed doing so as a lifelong project.
Loneliness
The book is called The Long Loneliness, and with this moniker, Day refers to a lifelong struggle to find community and love. For her, this loneliness took place throughout her life. From when she was establishing herself as a journalist in New York City and hardly knew anyone, to the time when she knew that she must baptize Tamar and eventually herself, thereby separating herself from her community, to when she was alone in Mexico, loneliness was a constant theme in Day’s life. This isolation is caused by her choice to branch off on her own search for religion, and also by her career and life choices. Sometimes, she is literally alone, and sometimes she just felt like no one understood what she was struggling with. The book is in part about ways to combat this isolation; what Day finds is that religion and positive action can create love and community.
Community
Day finds that the antidote to her loneliness is community. The strength and love emanating from it can even buoy one when they are alone. All of the efforts that Day and Maurin are involved in serve to create a community of like-minded people who strive to make a difference in the world via ideas and/or work. Combining forces can solve a lot of issues surrounding poverty, and allows for more ideas that solve issues in the community and in the wider world. This community buoyed Day when she was low, and she views it as a lasting legacy.
Love
Love is a concept that Day frequently touches upon. She discusses her first experiences with a crush as overlapping with her love for the brother she often cared for when she was a teenager. She describes the adult love she had for Forster, which she had to give up in order to fully establish a loving relationship with Catholicism, God, and Jesus Christ. This love for her religion gave her the most satisfaction, but she still needed a group of understanding people to surround her. The members of her Catholic Worker family brought her this type of communal love, which sustained her throughout her life.
