Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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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. 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. 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.

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.The fact that this was written by a single gay man of my age gave this book an extra dimension for me. But to say that this book is only relevant to gay men would be a disservice. I think that many people can relate to the thoughts, feelings and experiences shared in this book.

There are times in life we all encounter crushing loneliness, regardless of how many friends we have and whether we’re in a romantic relationship or not. One of these times comes when somebody we love dies. In her autofictional novella, Norwegian writer Ørstavik tries to come to terms with the loneliness of anticipatory grief. She has moved to Milan to be with the man she loves, only to find out he has cancer and less than a year to live. Ti amo chronicles the daily life of someone who can’t talk about what’s going on inside her to anyone. It’s a gripping book, and impossible to forget. 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. Es werden einige Aspekte der Einsamkeit und des Alleinlebens aufgezeigt, die mir teilweise nur unterbewusst oder gar nicht bekannt waren. Das Buch regt definitiv zum Nachdenken an und ist eine Lobrede an die Freundschaft. Dadurch wird das Buch sicherlich nicht nur für Menschen interessant, die mit ihrem Single-Leben hadern, sondern auch für solche, die in einer Partnerschaft leben und ihre alleinstehenden Freund*innen besser verstehen möchten. 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.

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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 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. 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.

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.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.