Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

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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. Shifting between philosophical essay and personal memoir, Schreiber explores existential questions that have become submerged in the flood of books about relationships and friendship. (…) With insightful excursions into queer, pandemic and suicidal loneliness, Schreiber focuses on the special problem of “ambiguous loss”. This is a cheerful-slash-melancholic protest against the relentless optimism propagated by the personal coaching craze, which claims that we can achieve anything. But what if we can’t? That’s what Schreiber asks – in words so honest that they hurt and heal at the same time.” Schreiber’s essays have what I can only describe as a lived-in feel. A few quotations here won’t suffice to convey how many shades of experience—of contentment and gloom and everything in between—show through. But the introspection always feeds on ideas as well as situations. A commitment to close friends of decades’ standing makes him attentive to Aristotle’s notion of the friend as “a second self,” but also increasingly dissatisfied with it.

On a brighter note, Schreiber writes beautifully about friendships and his own friends. They shouldn't be seen as a substitute for a romantic partner but something different altogether. "They are important in their own right," and he believes getting to really understand our friends, to be endlessly curious, rather than lazily presuming they will stay close, is the act of someone who values their friends. Netherlands (Nieuw Amsterdam), UK/USA (Reaktion Books), Italy (ADD Editore), South Korea (Bada Books) 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. 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.

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. The new publication by one of the most original German-language thinkers and most elegant essayists. 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. The joy of friendship cannot be located in an ideal. It does not materialise when the only thing being met is our own need for other people's attention. It does not transpire when we project our feelings and our unresolved conflicts onto our friends, or simply believe that the reason we know them so well is because they are so much like ourselves. The lasting joy of friendship if a by-product of giving, of gifting our attention. It is an experience of dissolving our barriers and occurs only when we succeed in broadening our own horizons and escaping the prison of our own problems and fears that we are so often trapped in. It materialises when we recognise the person in front of us in all their otherness. When we open ourselves up to their emotional reality, to their alternative view of the world. It emerges when we are there for someone else. 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?

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. 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.The pandemic put Schreiber’s carefully maintained balance of life, work and extended family of choice under tremendous strain, of course, as it did everyone. In particular it stirred up fear and anger over the gulf between expectations about happiness (others’ and his own) and the difficulty of getting from day to day under conditions of extreme isolation. Drawing on his own experiences, philosophical and sociological ideas, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for retreat and freedom, and that for closeness, love and community. In doing so, he illuminates the role that friendships play in this way of life. Can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book on how we want to live.