To be an American is to have buried, deep within our collective DNA, a profound sense of the lonesome.

At least that is what USC religious studies professor Kevin Lewis has speculated during a long - and perhaps lonesome - intellectual trek through the landscape of American music, fiction, art and religion.

For all the cultural reflection on the meaning of e pluribus unum, he believes Americans are a people who understand the solitary ache in the heart, the twist in the gut. After all, he noted, who among us has not walked through "that lonesome valley" or traveled down an open highway with the wail of Hank Williams in our ears?

"That word lonesome seems to do so much more work in our vocabulary than in any other anglophone culture," he said. "Americans like lonesome."

His ruminations have borne fruit in a newly published book titled, simply, "Lonesome: The Spiritual Meanings of American Solitude." In this scholarly work, he explains how we are a people hard-wired to perceive and experience lonesomeness in a way that is far different from that of our counterparts on other continents.

Rooted in our spiritual and religious life, lonesomeness is a vessel in which we pour parts of ourselves.

He writes: "... Lonesomeness offers to those given it a nontraditional, informal encounter with an unnamed 'otherness,' always inviting, always receding. If only we could peer deeply enough into it that we could 'see' through the feeling of it the 'otherness' plain!"

Lewis argues that this transcendent expression of lonesomeness exists alongside organized religion.

"This is part of the American cultural matrix for me, and as a religionist, as a practicing, believing, confessing, Calvinist, Protestant humanist Christian, I want to make sure that no one is offended by this on the traditional religious side," he said. Conversely, he is also determined that the book isn't taken as "an airhead spirituality guide for the perplexed."

Lewis has been captivated by the concept of lonesomeness for nearly two decades, sparked in part by a re-reading of "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Mark Twain's tale of Huck and the runaway slave Jim rafting down the Mississippi River is the consummate American story, rife with the contradictions of a people struggling with the idea of freedom and what it means.

"There is a passage where Jim and Huck, these archetypal black and white Americans, are rafting down the river," Lewis recalled. "In early dawn they pull up on the shore, and they tether the raft and put their fishing lines in, catch a couple fish, build a fire, and there is this wonderful moment of calm for them. Huck hears the sound of an axe chopping wood across the wide Mississippi. He sees the flash so far away, and the sound, there was this little delay, and he says it was solemn lonesome."

To be lonely is not the same as lonesome, Lewis said. Perhaps, he suggested, there is a whiff of self-pity about the lonely, an isolating, bitter phenomenon, but "there is nothing really good about lonely."

While the two words have been used interchangeably, lonesome is employed "to express this something extra," Lewis said. "I call this feeling-perception. It is not only an emotion, but to me it is something that relates to something you perceive."

The lonesome in American culture is "transfigured," he said, through an expansion of the spirit and in the unspeakable yearning for this "feeling-perception."

He quotes Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, two of the greatest 19th-century American poets who worshiped at the altar of solitude. Whitman speaks of the "joys of the free and lonesome heart," while Dickinson writes of the "lonesome Glee" that "sanctifies the mind."

In the artistic work of Edward Hopper, Lewis finds a transcendent lonesomeness in the artist's mix of light and shadow, in his realistic landscapes and in the solitary figures he places within his paintings.

And, of course, there is country music to plumb with its focus on loss, love and redemption. While Lewis hopes this book will be a catalyst for an intellectual, American Studies-style conversation about lonesomeness, there is no question his research will resonate among the average Joe who finds himself, like the songwriter duo Larry Cordle and Jim Rushing, "on lonesome standard time."

Even as he has relished the energy and exuberance of students for 35 years, the University of Chicago-trained Lewis confesses to his own deep affinity for solitude.

"My personality is one that embraces a little more solitude than some other people," he said. "I go out on the back porch and grade papers and read the paper and magazines and smoke a pipe; that's holy ground for me."

He is hopeful his reflections will jump-start a conversation on lonesomeness among academics and non-academics alike.

If Americans "think intentionally, if it crosses their mind, I think they would much rather be lonesome than lonely but they don't know why," he said. "I'm trying to tell them why."

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