Also, Schreiber, a gay man himself, writes poignantly about queer peoples’ experience of loneliness; as sadly this is all too often a huge, and sometimes devastating aspect of daily life for many queer people. He talks about how, throughout the 20th century, before the very recent liberations in western countries for LGBTQ+ communities, due to most societies oppression of queer people, the shame this caused led many to feel that they did not deserve to be loved, were unloveable. And sadly, how gay/queer shame is still very much a destructive force that affects all areas of the LGBTQ+ community worldwide. 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. 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.”

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.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.

Hiking, gardening, yoga and, eventually, foreign travel were among his coping strategies. This is as much a mini-memoir as it is a work of cultural criticism. Its academic tone is evident from a glance at the bibliography: Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Joan Didion, Deborah Levy, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson and so on. This resonated with other loneliness- or solitude-themed books I’ve read, such as The Lonely City by Olivia Laing and Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton. It offers not answers, but solemn, quiet thoughts. 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. 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.” 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.” 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.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. 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. Es werden einige Aspekte der Einsamkeit und des Alleinlebens aufgezeigt, die mir teilweise nur unterbewusst oder gar nicht bekannt waren. Das Buch regt definitiv zum Nachdenken an und ist eine Lobrede an die Freundschaft. Dadurch wird das Buch sicherlich nicht nur für Menschen interessant, die mit ihrem Single-Leben hadern, sondern auch für solche, die in einer Partnerschaft leben und ihre alleinstehenden Freund*innen besser verstehen möchten. 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. 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.

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. 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.Meiner Meinung nach, ging es in diesem Buch gar nicht so sehr ums Alleinsein. Eher um Gärten, Freundschaften, die Abwesenheit von romantischer Liebe und Corona. Ja, es war die Pandemie, die dazu geführt hat, dass sich Daniel Schreiber so allein gefühlt hat. Er war immer nur im Home Office, hat andere nur auf Spaziergängen mit Abstand getroffen und ewig niemanden umarmt. Natürlich fühlt er sich da einsam.