Three writers describe the toll taken by loneliness
ALONE Reflections on solitary living DANIEL SCHREIBER Translated by Ben Ferguson 152pp. Reaktion. £14.95.
THE LONELINESS FILES A memoir in essays ATHENA DIXON 192pp. Tin House. Paperback, $17.95.
THIS EXQUISITE LONELINESS What loners, outcasts, and the misunderstood can teach us about creativity RICHARD DEMING 336pp. Viking. $29.
WE HEAR OFTEN about an “epidemic” of loneliness. It is not hard to see why. A recent survey for the Office of National Statistics found that 49 per cent of adults in the UK are lonely always, often, some of the time or occasionally. Loneliness is more of a problem in young people. Nearly half of US adults report experiencing loneliness daily.
This epidemic brings other problems in its wake, including anxiety, depression, stroke and heart disease. These are certainly pathologies, but I’m tempted to say that loneliness itself is not pathological. Far from it; it is the normal human condition. It’s the half of westerners who don’t report loneliness who are the strange ones.
We are built for relationship. Our huge brains come with a huge metabolic bill that can only be justified by a huge return. The space inside our skulls is prime real estate. The return comes from the selective advantage that is a result of being able to broker and curate a large number of relationships. That demands colossal processing power. We should be called Homo gregarius, not Homo sapiens. We are quintessentially relational, not cognitive. Yet natural selection, or God, has overprovided: we have a capacity and a desire for relationship that can never be satisfied. We are hard-wired to be frustrated; to be locked inside our own heads and our own rooms, desperate for meaningful contact. These plangent, brave books by three normal, lonely writers, are three very different and complementary accounts of that desperation.
Daniel Schreiber’s Alone, immaculately translated from the German by Ben Ferguson, is an examination and celebration of friendship, marred by his need to denigrate more intimate relationships. He is a gay man, living alone. Why alone? His candour is alarming. He tells us that an exclusive romantic relationship would be too psychologically arduous, that he lacks the “fundamental optimism” (about anything) that such a relationship would demand, and that the toll taken by previous relationships has left him exhausted, in a kind of PTSD. More than that, “the world of gay love and desire was characterised by a mercilessness that, after a certain age, made you invisible”. He is invisible now to potential romantic partners.
But he is not, apparently, invisible to friends. They structure his life. His friendships are “exercises in hope, in letting go, in
