Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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For most of us, the idea of romantic love has lost hardly any of its allure. It continues to be the focus of our collective fantasies. It is, perhaps, the most essential component of what most people understand happiness to be. But more people live alone now than at any other time in history. People like me. Many of us, willingly or not, have said goodbye to the grand idea of love. Even if some of us still believe in it. Alone by Daniel Schreiber review – me, myself and I

At no time have so many people lived alone, and never has it been more elementary to feel the brutality of loneliness brought about by a self-determined life. But can we ever be happy alone? And why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure?Daniel Schreiber’s book-length essay Alone is an inventory of this emotional state – in a radically personal style. (…) He skilfully interweaves personal observations with cultural-historical reflections and current findings from psychology, social research, queer studies and medical science – and he does this very effortlessly, in a way that only Anglo-American essayists, from Hannah Arendt to Rebecca Solnit, know how to.”

In 1990, 27 percent of Americans surveyed reported having three or fewer close friends. By 2021, it was up to 49 percent. Between 2003 and 2020, the average amount of time spent socially engaged with friends (whatever their quantity or degree of closeness) fell by 20 hours per month; the decline was especially steep for people between ages 15 and 24. The surgeon general did not venture any predictions about how the aging of the population might influence such trends, or vice versa. But news from the frontier between robotics and gerontology suggests that help—of a sort—is on the way.

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. Daniel Schreiber is a Berlin-based essayist and biographer of Susan Sontag. These philosophical reflections on solitude and loneliness, coinciding with the first year of the pandemic, reveal his ambivalence about living alone and his frustration that the idea of the couple so defines society that anyone who does not fall in line is considered aberrant. Also, Schreiber, a gay man himself, writes poignantly about queer peoples’ experience of loneliness; as sadly this is all too often a huge, and sometimes devastating aspect of daily life for many queer people. He talks about how, throughout the 20th century, before the very recent liberations in western countries for LGBTQ+ communities, due to most societies oppression of queer people, the shame this caused led many to feel that they did not deserve to be loved, were unloveable. And sadly, how gay/queer shame is still very much a destructive force that affects all areas of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. 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. While he doesn't doubt that "you can live a very fulfilled life without a romantic partner; I do and so do others I know", he is also very honest about loneliness. This is something that most of us see as shameful, and we even shy away from others in that state. The acute psychological sense of loneliness during the pandemic encouraged many of us to start talking about loneliness, perhaps for the first time. Schreiber now senses that as we move further from that time, the conversation has quietened.

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. 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. 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. 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.

Keine literarischen Neuigkeiten verpassen!

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. 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.” 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. Donnish history teacher Alif is forever drawn to the past, but as a Muslim in Modi’s India, even he is finding it hard to ignore an increasingly intolerant present. When a Hindu student goads him about his faith on a school trip to a Mughal monument, Alif impulsively reaches out to twist the boy’s ear, setting in motion a calamitous sequence of events. With violence spreading across Delhi, Anjum Hasan deploys pathos and Urdu poetry – itself a product of India’s multifaith heritage – to illuminate his heartbreak. It’s a beautiful novel, timely and elegiac. Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

The new publication by one of the most original German-language thinkers and most elegant essayists.PDF / EPUB File Name: Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.pdf, Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.epub 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. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. 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.”