Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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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.” 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. 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.”

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.

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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. 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. 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. In einem Podcast wurde das Buch empfohlen, weil es aufzeigen würde, dass man Freundschaften fälschlicherweise nicht so schätzt wie Liebesbeziehungen. Aber der Autor macht genau das. Er sagt, irgendwann seien alle Freundschaften nichts mehr wert, weil sich alle in ihren Partnerschaften und Kleinfamilien verlieren. 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.

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 beschreibt zwar einige Punkte des Alleinseins sehr treffend, schildert viele Bespiele aus der Psychologie und der Literatur. Doch vieles davon bleibt sehr oberflächlich. Immer wenn ein Thema interessant zu werden droht, geht er wieder auf seine persönlichen Erfahrungen ein. Zunächst fand ich das noch nicht besonders störend und dachte eher, dass die ein sehr persönliches Buch sei. Doch je mehr ich las, desto mehr ärgerte mich dieses Gejammere. Denn der Autor befindet sich eigentlich in einer sehr privilegierten Position: Er hat eine schöne Wohnung, einen Job, Hobbies und Interessen, denen er nachgehen kann, und nicht zuletzt kann er dank Homeoffice auf einer Insel überwintern. Außerdem hat er Freunde, auch wenn er sich laufend beklagt, dass diese zu wenig Zeit für ihn hätten, da sie alle in einer Beziehung wären. Mir kam das ganze irgendwann so vor, als würde er einfach einen längeren Bericht für seinen Therapeuten schreiben. 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 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.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 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. 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.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.

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.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. 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.