Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living

Product Information

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.” For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.pdf, Alone_Reflections_on_Solitary_Living_-_Daniel_Schreiber.epub 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?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.” 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. The new publication by one of the most original German-language thinkers and most elegant essayists. 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. 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.

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. 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. Alone follows a “small” spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer. Perhaps deliberately, it feels less than fully fleshed out. It also treads cautiously over another “grand narrative”: that of happiness. Schreiber mentions experiencing depression and other problems, but does not share these with us in depth. He tells us about joyful friendships based on food, gardening and laughter, but does not recreate them at length. The effect can be a little flat.

Dieses Buch wurde in meiner Bubble hochgelobt und verehrt. Ich hatte hohe Erwartungen an den Essay von Daniel Schreiber. Allerdings konnte mich das Buch nicht so richtig überzeugen. Zum einen lag das sicherlich an dem teilweise sehr umständlichen Satzbau. Am Ende eines Satzes angekommen, konnte ich mich nicht mehr an seinen Anfang erinnern. Ich versuchte, die Worte aufzusaugen, sehr bewusst zu lesen, weil mich die Thematik persönlich beschäftigt. Mir war klar, dass ich einen Essay und keinen Roman lese. Trotzdem hätte ich mir oft einen Punkt anstelle eines Kommas gewünscht. Dazu kam, dass ich bei manchen Anekdoten die Pointe vermisst habe oder sich mir der Sinn dieser nicht erschloss. 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. For most of us, the idea of romantic love has lost hardly any of its allure. It continues to be the focus of our collective fantasies. It is, perhaps, the most essential component of what most people understand happiness to be. But more people live alone now than at any other time in history. People like me. Many of us, willingly or not, have said goodbye to the grand idea of love. Even if some of us still believe in it. Alone by Daniel Schreiber review – me, myself and I 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.