Loneliness

Loneliness in City of God is not merely an emotion that characters feel but a condition the novel examines with the rigor of a theological inquiry. Its most concentrated expression comes in the recurring sections titled "The Midrash Jazz Quartet Plays the Standards," in which the novel applies the ancient rabbinic method of midrash—the interpretive expansion of sacred text—to the secular canon of American popular song. By treating Tin Pan Alley standards as scripture, the book discovers in them a sustained meditation on human isolation, transforming the loneliness of the individual singer into a universal existential and even cosmic condition. The quartet's readings do not console; they expose. Again and again they return to the same wound: the terror of being alone with one's own thoughts, with no other person to receive them.

The Shadowed Self in "Me and My Shadow"

The first and most revealing of these midrashic readings concerns the standard "Me and My Shadow." The song's simple lyric—"Just me and my shadow / All alone and feeling blue"—is unpacked by the quartet as a profound statement about the structure of the self. The novel observes that the song speaks of oneself shadowed by loneliness, and pushes the image further: the singer of the song may himself be a shadow of himself. He could be singing, "Me and the me that's a shadow of me," a formulation that splits the solitary person into two, so that even his companionship is only with a reflection of his own isolation. The shadow is not a comfort but a proof of aloneness; it is the visible sign that there is no other presence. The lyric's setting—"We are here in this nameless avenue / We don't see anyone else in view"—reinforces the sense of a world emptied of other people, where the only witness to one's existence is oneself, doubled and diminished.

The Unbearable Absence of a Confidant

The quartet's commentary on the same song reaches its most painful insight in its reading of the singer's troubles. The novel glosses the lyric as saying, "Of all the troubles I've seen / The last and worst is the trouble of never again having someone to tell my troubles to." This is the core of the condition as the book understands it: loneliness is not the absence of company but the absence of a listener. The singer's deepest affliction is that his suffering has become incommunicable, that there is no ear to receive it. The reading then sharpens into something almost unbearable: "In fact he's saying, 'I'd be trouble-free / If I had someone to listen other than me.'" The self, trapped in its own solitude, recognizes that its only audience is itself—and that this is precisely the problem. The troubles themselves are secondary; what makes them unbearable is that they cannot be shared. This insight links loneliness to the novel's broader concern with witnessing, with the need for another consciousness to confirm one's reality, a theme that runs through the book's treatment of memory, faith, and the Holocaust.

The Standards as a Liturgy of Isolation

The Midrash Jazz Quartet's repertoire extends the meditation across multiple songs, each treated as a variation on the same theme. "Stardust" is introduced as another text for interpretation, its wistful recollection of a lost love becoming another instance of the solitary self reaching toward an absent other. "Good Night Sweetheart" follows, its tender farewell carrying the weight of final separation, the moment of parting that leaves the speaker alone. "Dancing in the Dark" appears with applause, its title itself a figure for the lonely individual moving through darkness without a partner. The cumulative effect is of a liturgy of isolation, a canon of songs that together form a sustained reflection on the varieties of aloneness: the shadowed self, the unconfided trouble, the lost love, the final goodnight. The quartet's method—treating these secular lyrics as sacred texts demanding interpretation—suggests that loneliness is not a modern accident but a permanent feature of the human condition, one that the popular song, no less than scripture, has always known how to name.

The Theological Dimension of Loneliness

The midrashic frame gives the theme its deepest resonance. By reading popular songs as scripture, the novel implies that the experience of loneliness is itself a theological problem, a question about the presence or absence of God. The shadow that accompanies the singer is a figure for the divine absence that haunts the book's characters—the sense of a world from which the sustaining presence has withdrawn, leaving only the self and its own reflection. The longing for someone to tell one's troubles to is, in this reading, also a longing for a divine listener, for a consciousness that receives and understands. The novel's insistence on this theme, returned to across multiple standards, makes loneliness not merely a personal affliction but a structural condition of existence in a world where the old certainties of faith have eroded. The Midrash Jazz Quartet, by finding scripture in the popular song, performs the book's central gesture: the discovery of the sacred in the secular, and the recognition that even the most ordinary expressions of human feeling—a Tin Pan Alley lyric about being alone—can open onto the deepest questions of meaning and connection.