pitiableness

Vivian Gornick, in her essay "The End of the Novel of Love," goes further and says that love itself has lost its metaphorical power - that loss of love no longer signifies existential aloneness or the pitiableness of the human condition.

Wasn't it in the rich soil of a murder investigation, in the fascination of the gradual unveiling of truth, in shared exertion and the prospect of danger, and in the pitiableness of desperate and broken lives that his poetry put out its shoots?