Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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People have always been lonely. They have experienced this feeling always and everywhere, and they have used all their strength to try to evade it. Loneliness is not a modern or even a contemporary phenomenon. No matter what our beliefs are about earlier eras and cultures, no matter what pastoral, religious and social idylls we project onto the past, loneliness is something that has always been recored in philosophy and literature.”

Meiner Meinung nach, ging es in diesem Buch gar nicht so sehr ums Alleinsein. Eher um Gärten, Freundschaften, die Abwesenheit von romantischer Liebe und Corona. Ja, es war die Pandemie, die dazu geführt hat, dass sich Daniel Schreiber so allein gefühlt hat. Er war immer nur im Home Office, hat andere nur auf Spaziergängen mit Abstand getroffen und ewig niemanden umarmt. Natürlich fühlt er sich da einsam.I know, Ernaux’s masterpiece is not strictly a book about aloneness, but its rich and multi-faceted tapestry can teach us more about our solitary lives than most of the books I know. The Years is a meditation on the events of the French writer’s private life and the changing attitudes of the society during her lifetime. Uncompromisingly yet poetically, she chronicles how a society produces loneliness by excluding people because of their sex, gender identity or marriage status. It’s hard to overstate how brilliant this book is. I’m not able to do it justice. If you haven’t read it already, start now. Hiking, gardening, yoga and, eventually, foreign travel were among his coping strategies. This is as much a mini-memoir as it is a work of cultural criticism. Its academic tone is evident from a glance at the bibliography: Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, Deborah Levy, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson and so on. This resonated with other loneliness- or solitude-themed books I’ve read, such as The Lonely City by Olivia Laing and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. It offers not answers, but solemn, quiet thoughts. But can you really live a good life alone, without a romantic relationship? How sustainable is a model like that? And how do you learn to live with being alone without it hurting, without lying to yourself? These were the questions that I didn’t know the answers to when I started writing my book, Alone. But I knew that I needed to find them. Some of the answers I found in literature – in a wide array of essays and novels, it turned out. This is a small selection. Schreiber has previously written a biography of Susan Sontag and several volumes of essays, and this is a work suffused with the essayistic sensibility. It blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author’s existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models. In place of a primary romantic or domestic partnership, he has a wide network of friends. Whether or not they are in couples themselves, they provide him with all the human connection, fellowship, support and sense of meaning that he needs.

Dieses Buch wurde in meiner Bubble hochgelobt und verehrt. Ich hatte hohe Erwartungen an den Essay von Daniel Schreiber. Allerdings konnte mich das Buch nicht so richtig überzeugen. Zum einen lag das sicherlich an dem teilweise sehr umständlichen Satzbau. Am Ende eines Satzes angekommen, konnte ich mich nicht mehr an seinen Anfang erinnern. Ich versuchte, die Worte aufzusaugen, sehr bewusst zu lesen, weil mich die Thematik persönlich beschäftigt. Mir war klar, dass ich einen Essay und keinen Roman lese. Trotzdem hätte ich mir oft einen Punkt anstelle eines Kommas gewünscht. Dazu kam, dass ich bei manchen Anekdoten die Pointe vermisst habe oder sich mir der Sinn dieser nicht erschloss. The joy of friendship cannot be located in an ideal. It does not materialise when the only thing being met is our own need for other people's attention. It does not transpire when we project our feelings and our unresolved conflicts onto our friends, or simply believe that the reason we know them so well is because they are so much like ourselves. The lasting joy of friendship if a by-product of giving, of gifting our attention. It is an experience of dissolving our barriers and occurs only when we succeed in broadening our own horizons and escaping the prison of our own problems and fears that we are so often trapped in. It materialises when we recognise the person in front of us in all their otherness. When we open ourselves up to their emotional reality, to their alternative view of the world. It emerges when we are there for someone else. Alone follows a “small” spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer. Perhaps deliberately, it feels less than fully fleshed out. It also treads cautiously over another “grand narrative”: that of happiness. Schreiber mentions experiencing depression and other problems, but does not share these with us in depth. He tells us about joyful friendships based on food, gardening and laughter, but does not recreate them at length. The effect can be a little flat. Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness. Schreiber writes interestingly about it, drawing a contrast between its polymorphic freedoms and the “grand narratives” of love and family – a phrase borrowed from the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. The big stories are more focused and unitary, whereas friendships tend to be shifting and diverse in nature. Some friends may be very close; others are fleeting acquaintances, and the rich variety of these “countless small narratives” can make them as significant as the grander ones. Weiters führt der Autor aus, wie viele Probleme das Queersein mit sich bringt, was zwar an sich interessant ist, aber das hat eben in diesem Buch nichts verloren. Vor allem dann nicht, wenn das Conclusio dann obendrein auch noch ist, dass der Autor ohne Partnerschaft und Freunde dann doch wieder sehr einsam ist. Ja, you don't say.

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In this candid and moving essay, German writer Daniel Schreiber explores what it means to be alone in a society that idealizes romantic relationships. Schreiber shares his own fears and experiences as a long-term single gay man and links them to some of the world’s foremost writers and thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt, Annie Ernaux, Audre Lorde and Maggie Nelson. He also examines the role that friendships play in our lives and whether they can replace a need for romantic love. But he notices that, amid the crisis, these friends instinctively prioritise their family “nesting” zones, leaving him feeling bereft. He begins to wonder: is a life like his sustainable, especially after a certain age? Has he been fooling himself? What does it really mean to live alone? Seeking perspectives on these questions, he roves from the TV series Friends to Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, from Frieda Fromm-Reichmann’s pioneering 1959 psychological study Loneliness to Hannah Arendt’s philosophical thoughts on friendship. Daniel Schreiber trägt viele philosophische Betrachtungen zum Thema Freundschaft und zum Alleinsein zusammen, die definitiv zum Nachdenken anregen. Auch beschreibt er, mit welchen Methoden er gegen seine Einsamkeit ankämpft. Diese sind aber sicherlich nicht auf jeden Menschen übertragbar.

Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone. We are all fated to feel lonely at some point in our lives. It is an unavoidable, existential experience. And perhaps also a necessary one.”I never made a conscious decision to live alone,” Schreiber says. Although he has had many partners, some of them long term, and even lived with two of them for a time, he is single at the time of writing, and can’t help but think that his state implies some kind of deficiency. Part of this he attributes to queer shame that he must have subconsciously internalized, and part to Pauline Boss’s concept of the “ambiguous loss” – missing what one has never had. Wolf is the German writer I love most. In this autofictional novel from 1987, she chronicles a day she spends by herself in a little house in the East German countryside trying to make sense of two competing events in her life: the risky brain surgery her brother undergoes that day and the nuclear meltdown in Cernobyl a few days before. It’s a difficult book at times because Wolf is grappling with something that our psyches usually don’t allow us to see: how helpless we are in the face of fateful events beyond our control, and how catastrophically we are thrown into history. Accident is so inspiring because Wolf knows that we have to deal with that fact alone – and gives us a hard-won example of how to do just that. Loneliness is bad for us: the US surgeon general has suggested it can cause a person as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It has increased alarmingly in many societies, especially following the pandemic and its regimes of isolation. Yet there is no shortage online of inspirational quotes about the creative and restorative powers of solitude, ranging from Edward Gibbon’s wry “I was never less alone than when by myself” to the catchy, unattributed “Sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to introspect”. For a more hard-boiled existential take, we have Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.” But it’s not all centred on the pandemic. The very essence of Friendship is a key theme. Schreiber looks at how friendship has been portrayed throughout literature and philosophy. We hear from Nietzsche, Sappho, Jean-Paul Sartre and Arendt amongst others.

Ich fand es sehr mutig und berührend, wie offen der Autor über seine privaten Erlebnisse und Empfindungen berichtet. Wie er sie in den Kontext der aktuellen Zeit setzt, aber auch ergründet, woher diese Gefühle kommen. Die Grundstimmung der Abhandlung ist bis fast zum Schluss traurig und betrübt, so dass es mir schwerfiel, daraus Hoffnung und etwas Positives zu schöpfen. Es hat lediglich etwas tröstliches, zu lesen, dass andere ähnliche Zweifel und Sorgen haben. Also dieses Buch ging sowas von am Thema vorbei, das Buch verdient einen Rant/Aufregerpost. Vermeintlich soll dieses Buch Einsamkeit und alleine sein entstigmatisieren und normalisieren. Ich habe so viele positive Stimmen vorab gelesen, dass ich mir doch einiges erwartet habe. Stattdessen bekommen wir eine absolut selbstbeweihräuchernde Erzählung eines sehr privilegierten Menschen. I personally feel that Hanya Yanagihara is our Tolstoy. In a way, all three of her novels deal with people going through their lives alone. This theme is most pronounced in A Little Life. Yanagihara rigorously examines how it is possible to lead a life shaped by trauma, and whether an almost perfect adopted family can change the daily encounters with the psychological and bodily consequences of that trauma. It’s a novel of an intensity beyond compare. Ich habe in der letzten Woche die zwei mir verfügbaren Daniel Schreiber Hörbücher regelrecht fieberhaft durchgehört. Von daher ist meine Meinung von diesem Buch auch stark von dem Vorgänger "Zuhause" geprägt - zu "Nüchtern" kann ich in diesem Kontext leider nichts sagen, da ich dies noch nicht gelesen habe.For anyone who wants to read and think about loneliness, this is the holy grail. Olivia Laing is such a masterful writer. Her reflections on the psychology and psychoanalysis of loneliness are as deft as they are enlightening. And her shedding light on the art and lives of queer artists such as Klaus Nomi, Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz, who at some point were almost forgotten, is a joy. Throughout her essays Laing makes clear that even though loneliness is debilitating and makes us feel unlike ourselves, it’s very human, too.