Alone

mistermarx

Jan 1

Alone

By Daniel Schreiber

Reaktion Books - £14.95

None of us can escape loneliness. It is an unavoidable, existential experience. Perhaps also a necessary one.

('Bodywork').

I think a lot of people who live alone feel this way. As soon as the first Christmas lights appear on the street, psychological dynamics are set into motion that are hard to escape. Instinctively, one feels as if one is moving through a world that belongs to other people, to lovers, to mothers and fathers, to grandparents. Roland Barthes described this feeling as a form of philosophical loneliness, a loneliness that arises because one moves outside of social systems and categories: 'Quite simply, I have no dialogue,' he writes in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. 'In return, society subjects me to a strange, public repression: I am merely suspended, a humanis, far from human things, by a tacit decree of insignificance: I belong to no repertoire, participate in no asylum.'

('The Kindness of Strangers').

The great Roy Orbison song 'Only the Lonely' delved into this most powerful of emotions back in May 1960, while throughout Alone, Daniel Schreiber delves yet further.

By way of being gay and also touching on the Covid epidemic, this welcoming book is relentlessly open, very well considered/constructed, and naturally, very honest: ''And nothing is is lonelier than the loneliness of not being seen, of not being known. Nothing feels like a greater loss of meaning than the silence it causes'' ('Never So Lonely').

While the author writes about listening to the body and taking the body into consideration, it's his focus on friendship that perhaps resonates the most: ''There are simply no rules, implicit or explicit statutes, no contracts, no sanctioning authorities, no external constraints when it comes to friendships. There is only me, the other person and what happens between us. Friendships are woven into our lives as perfectly and imperfectly as only real things can be ('Conversations with Friends').

Psychological and dark in places, the writing within Alone does manage to somehow take the reader on a journey, whilst informing them at the same time. And in so doing, simultaneously instilling hope.

That most sparkling and intrinsic of emotions

At 125 pages, this is a relatively short read, but still very much a poignant and powerful one nevertheless. Reason being, it touches on the deep, the personal and the resonant: emotions to which we all gravitate and relate.

David Marx