March 3, 2023
In an article in Harvard Business Review in 2017, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared that there is a “loneliness epidemic.” Whether or not that is true, there has been an epidemic of articles about loneliness lately, and the question is what to make of it all. Some writers say that loneliness is in fact a fairly recent emotion that did not exist, or at least was not regarded as important, before the great turn away from traditional collectivism towards modern individualism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Others say it is startlingly recent, a phenomenon of the last 10-15 years. Some articles focus on the allegedly increased loneliness of young people, others on the loneliness of the old. Some focus on the loneliness of men, who are increasingly not only without relationships with women but bereft of friendships with other men. Many of the articles agree with the former Surgeon General that widespread loneliness is not just an emotional but a health problem, and there are claims that “social isolation,” resulting in loneliness, can result in various issues that shorten people’s lifespan. Some blame smartphones and social media. Others claim that Covid has exacerbated the problem by making at least some, especially older people, permanently isolative out of fear. Whole books have appeared on the topic, including two reviewed by the literary critic Terry Eagleton: A History of Solitude, by David Vincent, and A Biography of Loneliness, by Fay Bound Alberti. In pondering the theme of loneliness, I find I am not alone.
Well, it appears that the world has caught up with me: already in high school, I was possessed by the theme of loneliness. A story I felt had helped to save my life was Theodore Sturgeon’s “A Saucer of Loneliness,” whose opening I quoted in the previous newsletter. Another lifesaver was Harlan Ellison, who has stories with titles like “Lonelyache” and “Alive and Well and on a Friendless Voyage.” So it came as somewhat of a surprise when, trying to come to some conclusions for this newsletter, I had difficulty in defining precisely what loneliness is. It is a feeling of deficiency, of lack, a painful yearning for something missing, but what? Love? Friendship? Family? Social relations? The correct answer appears to be “all of the above.” The common factor is lack of connection—the jargon phrase these days is “social isolation.” But what kind of connection? Is loneliness no more than gregariousness? Do we have an impulse to herd together, like sheep? Yet togetherness is not a remedy: we can be lonely when surrounded by other people, as a title of a famous book of the 1950’s told us: The Lonely Crowd. This is especially true of introverts, who may feel more lonely in a group than when alone.
I have by now looked at perhaps a dozen articles on the loneliness epidemic, and what is at times missing from them is a recognition that mere togetherness not only is not enough but may make the problem worse. The definitive literary treatment of this theme is Sartre’s play No Exit (1944), with its famous line, “Hell is other people.” The entire play consists of the conversation of three people trapped together in a room after death. It quickly becomes clear that these people are rightly damned, not just for what they did in life but for what they still are, which is selfish narcissists. As they recount their past lives, we learn that their past misdeeds were not things like stealing or murder but using and betraying other people, especially those closest to them. The title of the play is ironic: it turns out that the door to the room is not locked, and yet no one will leave, because, exactly like the sinners in Dante’s Inferno, they are still locked into their sin, which is a mental state. They are in fact still sinning, each trying to use and manipulate the others, each obsessively concerned with their image in the others’ eyes—each is indeed Narcissus, and other people only exist to them as mirrors in which they hope to see themselves as the fairest of them all.
Dante would have understood completely. When I teach the 5th canto of the Inferno, the circle of the Lustful, I ask students how they interpret the fate of Paolo and Francesca, illicit lovers trapped in a gigantic whirlwind for all eternity? Are they symbols of the ultimate degree of romantic love, willing to go to hell itself for the sake of being together? They have sometimes been understood that way. But I ask them to think of that person with whom they have broken up and are so over, the very thought of whom gives them an impulse to go and play a lot of early Taylor Swift bitter breakup songs. Imagine being trapped with that person for all eternity. Now that is hell. In an era when divorce was impossible or at least highly disapproved of, there were any number of marriages like that, my parents’ being one of them. They would bicker constantly, any pretext, no matter how inconsequential, serving as excuse. My father’s second marriage was exactly the same. There was no relaxing around them: you just waited for the next moment when one of them would drop a provoking remark and the other would bristle and lash out. In my 20’s I took care of an apartment building of senior citizens, whose lives I knew because they left their screen doors open all day, and there were couples in their 70’s and 80’s who were still picking at each other every day, practically every hour. When I first read Andrew Marvell’s 17th century poem “The Garden,” in which he says that “Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone,” I felt I knew exactly what he was talking about.
Of course, it was God himself who said, “It is not good for man to live alone,” and created Eve. One of the most moving aspects of Milton’s Paradise Lost is his insistence that the deeper purpose of marriage is not reproduction or economic survival but the connection he summed up in the word “conversation,” literally the back-and-forth interchange between two people. But he was insightful enough to show that Adam and Eve’s first act after the Fall was to invent the marital argument, rip-roaring and no holds barred, each person denying any fault and trying to blame and demean the other. The biting last line of Book 9 reads, “And of their vain contest appeared no end.” The disastrous experience of Milton’s first marriage drove him to write four tracts arguing for liberty of divorce for what we now euphemistically call “irreconcilable differences,” imagining what happens when a naïve youth “shall find himself bound fast to an uncomplying discord of nature, or, as it oft happens, to an image of earth and phlegm, with whom he looked to be the copartner of a sweet and gladsome society, and he sees withal that his bondage is now inevitable; though he be almost the strongest Christian, he will be ready to despair in virtue, and mutiny against Divine Providence.”
Presently we have incels complaining that women will have nothing to do with them, by which they clearly mean sex plus doing the laundry. In the 1950’s, Hugh Hefner proferred a solution to this in the form of the “Playboy philosophy”: become an affluent bachelor, a “playboy,” with a sports car and an expensive hi-fi system, and the babes will flock to you, ripe for the taking. This wish-fulfilment died with the advent of women’s economic independence, as more and more women no longer needed to become trophy wives or girlfriends in order to live comfortably, which is the reason for the right-wing hatred of feminism. Before the Playboy philosophy there was the older idealization of bachelorhood, as in the traditional folk song “Bachelor’s Hall”:
Bachelor’s Hall is always the best If you’re sick drunk or sober it’s always a rest No woman to scold you, no children to bawl Always stay single, keep Bachelor’s Hall
One of the greatest domestic-comedy comic strips of all time, Gasoline Alley, began as the story of a confirmed bachelor, Walt Wallet. Some of the early strips showed Walt observing the marriages of his more or less henpecked male buddies and thanking his lucky stars. But on Valentine’s Day in 1921, a foundling was laid on his doorstep, and he became what we now call a single parent. He not only changed his ideas completely, but married and fathered a dynasty that is, with numerous hangers-on, the multi-generational cast of the strip to the present day (yes, it is still running after more than a century!). I very much doubt that Frank King, the creator of Gasoline Alley, had George Eliot’s Silas Marner in mind, but the story premise is very much the same. Silas Marner, an embittered misanthrope compensating for his social isolation by hoarding gold, is redeemed by coming to care for and love a foundling girl.
Nevertheless, the bachelor’s life, which led to the development of men-only clubs, was still respectable for Oxford dons like C.S. Lewis—until, like Walt Wallet, he met a woman who extracted him from it. My information is out of date, but I remember that, back when I lived in Buffalo in the 1990’s there were still men’s clubs in both Toronto and Buffalo, the York Club and the Buffalo Club respectively, which women could enter only as guests of the male members—by the back door. Lewis’s friend Tolkien was married, but Tolkien’s hobbits, Bilbo and Frodo, live the comfortable bachelor life. Such a life, however, was available only to the well off: for poorer people, marriage was a survival arrangement. The Oxford don kind of life elevates male companionship clearly as a substitute for relationships with women, and female academics were regarded as intruders. I think the same kind of resentment of “intrusion” is driving some men to cling to the idea of an all-male military and even perhaps an all-male priesthood.
In the 1960’s the literary critic Leslie Fiedler pointed out how American literature was dominated by male-bonding relationships, such as the friendship between James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking and the Native American Chingachgook. There isn’t one woman in the 600-some pages of Moby Dick. In the 1990’s, books like Robert Bly’s Iron John argued that men needed to escape from the constraints of a society dominated by women and female values, go off in the woods, and bond together to recover their male independence. What we are being told now, however, is that men have not done that. Instead, more and more men report in surveys that they do not have a single male friend. Nor do they have relationships with women. Why this should be treated as a mystery is, well, a mystery. Arwa Mahdawi smartly observes in The Guardian (February 25, 2023), that
Men aren’t naturally stoic: they’re just taught from a young age that feelings and emotions are for girls. They’re taught to lock up their feelings. They’re taught not to put as much value in relationships as women. They’re taught that they’re “less naturally relational.” And then people sit around wondering why young men aren’t in relationships and are so lonely. It’s not porn that’s the problem, it’s patriarchy.
The response of some men to this loneliness is anger, so they become trolls online, mass shooters in public places, or radicalized terrorists.
Once we start looking for them, we may find other behaviors whose deeper motive is to stave off loneliness. I have known families in which there are large numbers of children—and grandchildren, and eventually even great-grandchildren—families that are intensely close-knit, a webwork of togetherness, always getting together—after all, in a family that large, it is always somebody’s birthday. Part of me genuinely envies such warm, inclusive families, which are everything my own was not: we were more like refrigerator magnets polarized the wrong way, mutually repelling. And it was not just my uniquely dysfunctional family: I belong to the 60’s generation that invented the “generation gap”: in my adolescent years, most of my friends and I wanted nothing more than to move away from our families. For a short while, this became a mass phenomenon: it was regarded as scandalous that a good number of the hippies of Haight Ashbury around the time of the Summer of Love in 1967 were teen runaways, many of them underage girls. The pastoral dream of the “commune” flourished briefly before falling victim to practicalities. Woodstock, the world’s most famous party, gave rise to the dream of a whole “Woodstock nation,” a kind of universal commune.
The hippie phenomenon, in its poignant transience, often reminds me of the atmosphere of the earliest Christian communities, complete with long hair and sandals, many of whose members had left marriages and families to join something more satisfying. Later, it became a commonplace of pop sociology that TV shows like Friends and Cheers in the 90’s reflected a new social trend in which young people, alienated from traditional family, formed compensatory groups of friends, kindred spirits as I’ve always called them. Schools may be secular places to belong, not just for the professors but for the students—especially for students who have lost or are alienated from their homes. Literary examples include Hogwarts and Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, otherwise known as the X-Men.
Whether traditional or revisionist, social arrangements designed to stave off loneliness have a tendency to fall victim to what the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer called the hedgehogs’ dilemma. A group of hedgehogs try to huddle together for warmth, but can only get so close before beginning to prick each other with their sharp quills. Yet when they move apart they get cold again, so they are driven to seek warmth together, only to be pricked again. The process repeats itself indefinitely. Schopenhauer intended this as a parable of the human condition.
Here was a man who wrote famously about love as a great illusion helping to sustain the will to live, but who, despite a number of affairs, never married. Biographical accounts often quote a letter from his own mother saying that she would do anything rather than try to live with him again, so clearly he was one of the hedgehogs whereof he wrote. But his challenge remains: are we all hedgehogs once the pretenses are dropped, just some more prickly than others?
It becomes increasingly clear that the yearning for connection that we call loneliness is systemic. It may manifest itself specifically, as a yearning for same-sex friendship, other-sex love or friendship, family relationships, social and institutional relationships, even bonds with pets and other animals, but the real need is to become part of an interconnected reality that includes them all, an interconnected cosmos that is at the same time a total consciousness or identity.
Unexpectedly, this brings us back to the theme of last week’s newsletter, the experience of the “oceanic,” of a oneness that surrounds and includes all things within its circumference, a unity that can be described in many ways, but the commonest of them is simply “love.” In “Eleanor Rigby,” the Beatles ask, “All the lonely people /Where do they all come from?” I am dryly amused to learn that “Eleanor Rigby” was released as a single whose other side was…”Yellow Submarine.” We all live under the sea, in a yellow submarine, and “As we live a life of ease / Every one of us has all we need.” No one is lonely in a yellow submarine.
I’m glad to revisit the theme of the oceanic from a new perspective because it gives me an opportunity to introduce two works I had to exclude for lack of space. One is an extraordinary science fiction story, “Surfacing,” by Walter Jon Williams, which provides yet another version of the modern form of the vertical axis mundi, the up-down cosmos in which, reversing traditional cosmologies like Dante’s, up is the direction of isolation and alienation while down—in the oceanic depths—is a possibility for union and love. The hero is an alienated young man, Anthony, turned into a loner by a psychologically abusive Christian cultist father. On an alien world, he is studying and communicating with an alien life form, the Deep Dwellers. Anthony does not really understand his own motivations, but what draws him to the Deep Dwellers is the fact that, because they are “oceanic” in the literal sense of living in the deepest part of the ocean, both their language and their consciousness are oceanic in the sense of non-alienated. The alien word that translates their mode of being comes across in English as “GRACE.” Anthony comes to realize that “there is no Other in the Dwellers’ speech” (46):
The Dweller language, Anthony had discovered, had no separation of subject and object…The Dwellers lived in darkness and, like Earth’s cetaceans, in a liquid medium. Perhaps they were psychologically unable to separate themselves from their environment, from their fluid surroundings….They were surrounded by a liquid three-dimensional wholeness, not an air-earth-sky environment from which they could consider themselves separate. (49)
Whereas the antagonist belongs to a second alien race that is bodiless but teleports “down” to the surface of the planet. He is nicknamed Kyklops, presumably because he is a voyeur—immortal, immensely old, bored, and crazy—who lives vicariously by taking over the protagonist’s lover. At the end of the story, Anthony learns to trust enough to risk a direct communication with the Deep Dwellers. He repeatedly refers to taking the risk of coming out of his shell, making “first contact,” as “jumping off a cliff”—in other words, of falling. But on the story’s last two pages, the Deep Dwellers rise to make contact with him. They are enormous—whales are small in comparison—and Anthony is afraid that they will be injured because of the loss of pressure. In a moving reply, the Dwellers respond, “DAMAGE IS ACCEPTABLE” (87). The last line of Theodore Sturgeon’s “A Saucer of Loneliness” says that “even to loneliness there is an end, to those who are lonely enough, long enough.” The deeply lonely Anthony has learned to trust enough to risk contact. And when he does so, the Deep Dwellers risk their lives ascending to greet him.
Anthony is a misanthrope who relieves the pressure of his bottled-up anger by going into bars and starting fist fights. He relates to oceanic aliens rather than to his own kind, who regard the aliens as monsters, because he feels like an alien and a monster himself. By a now-familiar synchronicity, while pondering this and the previous newletter, I ran across an article by Ella Braidwood about not one but several LBGTQ+ writers who feel a kinship with marine creatures whose native environment is the all-inclusive, all-transforming sea (sexuality-and-gender-through-sea-life, The Guardian, Feb. 3, 2023).
One, Sabrina Imbler, author of My Life in Sea Creatures (2022), says of the Pacific Ocean, “If I could live anywhere, this is where I would be: I would be a fish in this place. I think about queerness in a similar way– as a space of possibility and radical imagination.” One of the book’s essays is about the cuttlefish, which can change its appearance to that of the opposite sex. Another is about the yeti crab, which is a deep dweller: it lives in deepsea hydrothermal vents, suggesting to Imbler how “queer people often take refuge in spaces that straight people don’t want.” The sea is “full of different bodies [and] different ways of being in the body.” Then there is Jade Song’s Chlorine (2023), a novel about a competitive swimmer who, according to the author, “dreams of being in the water permanently seeking a life and a self and a body as the mermaid that she’s always wanted to be….It’s a novel for anybody who’s ever dreamed of transcending their bodies and their selves into a truer state of being – truer to ourselves, not true to whatever standard society has set in us….Which is, I think, what we all long for.” Song says, “I am an Asian queer femme in America, and in a way that makes me a monster,” they say. “A sexy monster, just like a mermaid, but a monster nonetheless. But I think being monstrous is far more fun than being a normal, boring human.”
Song says one more thing that relates them to a great poem by an earlier lesbian writer: “being queer feels like moving through water while everyone else is on land, because you have to learn how to swim, you have to learn how to move your body, learn to adapt your lungs.” A very similar passage occurs in “Diving into the Wreck” (1973), by lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich, which I consider to be one of the great poems of the twentieth century. The entire poem is an extended metaphor of undersea diving, written as a long, thin column of verse suggesting a vertical axis from surface to depths. For the first half of the poem, the speaker repeatedly emphasizes how she has to make this descent “alone,” and what she descends into is another mode of being:
the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element
But when she finds “the wreck” that she is diving to explore, suddenly she is not alone—there is a “merman.” In that moment, the narrative takes a remarkable turn:
We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
Suddenly, she is also at once “he” and the wreck itself:
we are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene
The wreckage is clearly that of a larger identity that unites all beings across lines of gender. Like Humpty Dumpty, it has shattered into the fragments that are our separate, isolated, lonely selves. Adrienne Rich did not contrive this myth alone: variants of it appear in the Kaballah, in the Corpus Hermeticum, in later writers like William Blake and James Joyce. We are, I am, and you are—you, the reader—the one.
We are lonely because this larger, oceanic identity lies wrecked at the bottom of the primal sea. What wrecked it? Which is a way of asking, what caused the Fall? What in turn is a way of asking, what still causes it, every day and every hour? One answer has already become clear: a narcissistic selfishness that rejects every form of Other in favor of a solipsistic self-love. Loneliness is the yearning born of an awareness that other people, other things, are outside the self. We are marooned on the desert island of our ego, Robinson Crusoes desperately seeking Fridays. If we get lonely enough, even a volleyball will do, as Tom Hanks showed in Castaway. Narcissism conquers that sense of otherness by delusionally incorporating all others into the ego-self. Other people and other things only exist as aspects of the bloated ego-self. They are “possessions,” a significant word. It is the Greek myth of Kronos or Saturn devouring his children, the myth of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandma swallowed by the Big Bad Wolf. Homo homini lupus: man is a wolf to man. The narcissist hungers and devours, and is never satiated. The 1% own everything, yet they never have enough. Capitalism is an economic system founded on narcissism, and therefore depends on more, more, more. I read an article recently by a therapist who treated the 1%. He says that they are very lonely. There is the hunger to devour, and the reciprocal hunger to be devoured. The cultist, including the MAGA cultist, wants to be swallowed up in the huge personality of the charismatic leader, the super-wolf. You don’t have to feel alone anymore when you are incorporated into a collective self. That the collective self is a delusion does not matter—it feels good.
When Buddhism says that enlightenment occurs through a detachment from desire and fear, it is such endless craving that it means by desire. Fear is its mirror opposite: instead of aggressive devouring, a retreat, a building of walls. The oceanic is a feeling of connection, of all things belonging to all other things, all people belonging to one another. That is socialism! some cry. It is astonishing that the most famous song in Anais Mitchell’s musical Hadestown, “Why We Build the Wall,” was actually composed before the Trump years. Why do we have to build the wall?
Because we have and they have not My children, my children Because they want what we have got
I do not think that the oceanic manifests itself as some kind of otherworldly mystical consciousness, although there may be moments of awareness that we might call “depth experiences,” counterparts to Maslow’s “peak experiences.”
Its commonest manifestation may be simply what we call “trust.” We remember a time, in certain communities at least, when people left their doors unlocked while they were gone, and we can hardly believe it was real. Modern consciousness was first defined when Descartes said that his philosophical method was to doubt everything until finally he reached something he could not doubt. He finally found it. Not to our surprise, it was the barenaked ego: me, myself, and I. The “I” is the image of a wall.
We have a horrified fascination with scammers, who convince people to trust in order to take advantage of them. And in the age of the Internet, it is impossible to know who to trust, so street wisdom says to trust no one, because nothing hurts more than the betrayal of one that you trusted. Yet the essence of faith is trust: that was Kierkegaard’s point about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, trusting a God whose demand was incomprehensible and seemingly vicious. Job says, “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.” Kierkegaard was right: such a “leap of faith” is absolutely terrifying. God is responsible for all the cruelties of human history. Do we trust him anyway, like a woman who stays with an abuser because she so desperately needs to be loved? To be honest, I cannot make such a leap of faith, and do not trust it. God as an inscrutable, absolute Other who plays cat-and-mouse with the human race is nothing I can trust. Indeed, I defy him, and refuse to call him God. He is the wrong metaphor, and I must find another.
Trust is when you jump, confident that someone or something will catch you when you fall. In “Surfacing,” Anthony comes to think that “jumping off a cliff” is the whole meaning of life. What must it feel like to believe that the universe is somehow, despite all appearances, trustworthy? What must it feel like to believe that the whole world is a gigantic net of interconnections, a safety net that will catch us when we fall, even if it is a long way down? To be able to say, like Ferdinand in Shakespeare's Tempest, “Though the seas threaten, they are merciful. / I have cursed them without cause” (5.1.209-10). Sometimes, just briefly, I am touched by that feeling, as by an angel. It is a brief feeling of safety in a world of dog eat dog, of wolf eat wolf. It is the feeling that paradise, despite all they tell us, is not actually lost, and never was.
References
Williams, Walter Jon. “Surfacing.” In The Best of the Best, Volume 2: 20 Years of the Best Short Science Fiction Novels, edited by Gardner Dozois. St. Martins, 2007. 45-88. Originally published 1988.