The authors of the Victorian time period faced feelings of " isolation, of alienation, brought about by man¿s new situation."They felt, " Alienated from God,from [their] fellow man, from [themselves]." (239 Miller)The writers mourned abandonment. Finding themselves in a "new life of man in the city...each as isolated from all the others as if he were living on a desert island" (237 Miller), authors such as Dickens expose the "spiritual poverty"(238 Miller) that many people felt at the time.  Pleading for answers, Kierkegaard cries, "Is there no director?" (239 Miller).

The Victorian period was a time of self-discovery. On a constant quest for the ever-evasive relationship with God, poets and authors alike articulated the distancing of God from man. They searched for answers as to why this was so, but where did they search? Many resorted to studies of society. These attempts yielded only more questions, more confusion and greater feelings of isolation.  

This image represents man standing in the face of God, but feeling alone. Sometimes he 'sees' but doesn't see at all.

Buckley's The Pattern of Conversion explores solutions to the daunting question "Where did God go?" Realms of business transformed; while cities and towering buildings erected around man, perhaps it was not these physical barriers, but personally constructed mental barriers from communion, as explained in Miller's The Disappearance of God, that ignited these feelings of desertion. Buckley cites a excerpt of Kierkegaard¿s The Sickness Unto Death in attempts to reconcile the issues man has raised concerning his relationship with God. Connecting Kierkegaard's work to his own prepositions, Buckley explains," 'The most dangerous form of despair'...was man's unawareness of his spiritual essence, his blind absorption in material values, the blank indifference which to Carlyle was Atheism itself." (250 Buckley). Buckley calls his reader to cast off "absorption in material values" and "realize the true self by devotion to the Eternal" (250 Buckley). Rather than God distancing himself from man, it can be asserted that man capitulated to a more comfortable way of life, seeking and investing in things other than his relationship with God, thus finding himself so out of touch with his Director. Instead of looking to society to see God, people of the time ought to have assessed their personal communion with God to find answers.

This painting is Edvard Munch's Despair. It represents man's feeling of isolation when he searches for liberation to " renovate the springs and purify the aims of the siled and exhausted nature" (Buckley 250)

WILLING