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. 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. Researchers are also working on a new metric, the Companion Robot Impact Scale, to quantify the benefits for seniors’ health and well-being. Whether CRIS will be used in-house or as a rating system for consumers is not clear. In any event, the most important number to keep in mind at this point is the 70percent of doctors surveyed who thought companion robots should be covered by insurance. 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. 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. 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. 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. While he doesn't doubt that "you can live a very fulfilled life without a romantic partner; I do and so do others I know", he is also very honest about loneliness. This is something that most of us see as shameful, and we even shy away from others in that state. The acute psychological sense of loneliness during the pandemic encouraged many of us to start talking about loneliness, perhaps for the first time. Schreiber now senses that as we move further from that time, the conversation has quietened. 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.

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. 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. 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.

I know, Ernaux’s masterpiece is not strictly a book about aloneness, but its rich and multi-faceted tapestry can teach us more about our solitary lives than most of the books I know. The Years is a meditation on the events of the French writer’s private life and the changing attitudes of the society during her lifetime. Uncompromisingly yet poetically, she chronicles how a society produces loneliness by excluding people because of their sex, gender identity or marriage status. It’s hard to overstate how brilliant this book is. I’m not able to do it justice. If you haven’t read it already, start now.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.” There are times in life we all encounter crushing loneliness, regardless of how many friends we have and whether we’re in a romantic relationship or not. One of these times comes when somebody we love dies. In her autofictional novella, Norwegian writer Ørstavik tries to come to terms with the loneliness of anticipatory grief. She has moved to Milan to be with the man she loves, only to find out he has cancer and less than a year to live. Ti amo chronicles the daily life of someone who can’t talk about what’s going on inside her to anyone. It’s a gripping book, and impossible to forget.

Daniel Schreiber’s book-length essay Alone is an inventory of this emotional state – in a radically personal style. (…) He skilfully interweaves personal observations with cultural-historical reflections and current findings from psychology, social research, queer studies and medical science – and he does this very effortlessly, in a way that only Anglo-American essayists, from Hannah Arendt to Rebecca Solnit, know how to.” Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Due out next month, this novel follows an unnamed girl who flees from a colonial settlement in 1600s Virginia to make her way through the forests and rivers of North America. Groff turns the ideological underpinnings of classic Robinsonades deftly on their head. During her fight for survival the girl comes to an understanding of the natural world and her life within it which is a rare testament to the spiritual upsides of loneliness that we can only experience when we are alone. 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. 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.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. He encourages his readers to ignore the discomfort and go there. "Loneliness has a big role in our lives, and there are certain things we can only learn when we are lonely." He believes getting ahead of that understanding, before we become waylaid by any of life's surprises, such as grief or becoming ill, is wise and helpful. Loneliness is bad for us: the US surgeon general has suggested it can cause a person as much damage as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. It has increased alarmingly in many societies, especially following the pandemic and its regimes of isolation. Yet there is no shortage online of inspirational quotes about the creative and restorative powers of solitude, ranging from Edward Gibbon’s wry “I was never less alone than when by myself” to the catchy, unattributed “Sometimes you’ve got to disconnect to introspect”. For a more hard-boiled existential take, we have Orson Welles: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”

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. 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. 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 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.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. Donnish history teacher Alif is forever drawn to the past, but as a Muslim in Modi’s India, even he is finding it hard to ignore an increasingly intolerant present. When a Hindu student goads him about his faith on a school trip to a Mughal monument, Alif impulsively reaches out to twist the boy’s ear, setting in motion a calamitous sequence of events. With violence spreading across Delhi, Anjum Hasan deploys pathos and Urdu poetry – itself a product of India’s multifaith heritage – to illuminate his heartbreak. It’s a beautiful novel, timely and elegiac. Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living 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. 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. 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.”