1.

Solitude sounds like a sad word – one person stuck on their own, like on a desert island. COVID-19 solitude has not been like this for me. As a family unit, we have been isolated from friends and extended family but have been able to talk to people who we would not usually talk to. For example, neighbours whose faces we cannot see but who we can shout to over hedges.

Living as a couple who are used to being together as a unit is not a challenge. For our adult children separated from partners and friends, life has been much tougher. The positives for us have included having more time to spend with our children, who live with us, and having conversations about the meaning of life and everything! We have all had the chance to get to know each other as adults and we realise just how wonderful our children are.

Forced ‘solitude’ has given me time: time to get fitter, lose weight, do some art, sewing, daily yoga and meditations. The pace of life has been slower and more considered. Worry about the future consequences do creep in and and keeping these at a bay is hard at times. However, time to re-evaluate what and who is important to us has been good and now, beginning to meet people again is a joy.  

2.

I am an only child and grew up being very happy in my own company, reading, writing, listening to music and inventing new worlds in my imagination. My adolescence and early adulthood became a time of social anxiety when I was consumed by a desire to belong, to be part of a group, accepted and included. I began to associate solitude with ‘missing out’.

At university I struggled to fit in and felt lonely and isolated. Sitting alone in my room while other people were out socialising made solitude seem like failure.

When I left university my confidence grew and I constructed an image of myself as someone who was popular, sociable and always out and about. It became almost a compulsion and my hectic social life sometimes led me to burn out and become ill with exhaustion.

For me, lockdown has been a healing experience, an opportunity to reset and reflect. I have rediscovered the joys of my own company: simple pleasures like sitting on my sofa reading, writing, discovering new music, working through my years-long backlog of film and television recommendations or sometimes simply listening to birdsong through the window.

I am in frequent contact with friends via social media and phone and video calls and have begun to appreciate meaningful contact with a few important people rather than the superficial thrill of being part of a crowd. Now, as lockdown begins to ease, it is the prospect of the end of solitude which brings me anxiety.

I am a 34-year old archivist.

3.

Before the pandemic solitude was a rare thing in my life. Working in a constant customer-facing workplace, going to dance classes four times a week and having an active social life meant solitude was almost none existent and something I craved.

When lockdown hit and all these things stopped solitude kicked it very quickly and I felt very alone and unfamiliar. Over the weeks, however, I have started to appreciate solitude and see it more of a positive rather than a negative as a time for focusing on myself. Nevertheless I have massively missed my friends and family. I think COVID has taught me to try and use solitude wisely, but only ever in small doses so as not to allow loneliness to set in.  

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post The Unexpected Solace of Lockdown appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

For myself, solitude has always meant time spent completely alone in whatever environment. A chance to not have to converse and interact with others, and to literally ‘just be’ with my own thoughts, with no outside influences. Personally, I’m an individual who has long since realised that I require time to be alone to maintain my mental health.

COVID has meant a loss of this solitude due to the fact that both my husband and teenage son are now present at all times, and so I’m rarely completely alone. Whilst they make few demands, and are actively engaged in activities physically apart from me, they are still constantly present within the household, and there’s little opportunity for the true solitude I need. I look forward to a time when I’m completely alone again.

I’m a 47-year-old female, who suffers from depression and anxiety.

2.

Prior to the pandemic I found solitude whilst driving, which is part of my job, averaging four hours per day in the car alone. Sometimes this alone time left me feeling lonely and lethargic. However, other times I found the alone time to be productive; just me and my thoughts often helped me to think things through and overcome challenges.

With COVID-19 and the lockdown and being a parent, most days have been spent with my daughter, which has delivered a different type of solitude. I find myself missing contact with adults and feeling lonely in that respect but at the same time having no time to myself whilst my 5-year-old daughter needs entertaining and demands attention (which has also provided some magical father and daughter time and memories). Ultimately, both prior to and during lockdown, solitude for me has two sides to it. The side I experience probably depends my personal state of mind at the time.

I’m a 32-year-old father and husband; my wife is a key worker who worked many hours of overtime, especially in the early weeks of the lockdown.

3.

Before the pandemic solitude meant hours at home working, writing. Or walking alone with people in sight. Cycling. Having lunch on my own in a cafe, or coffee, always with something to read. Train journeys, also with something to read. Solitude was a way of immersing myself entirely in the selfish experience of food, books, or phone. In the early days of the pandemic, before lockdown, this didn’t change much; I cycled rather than used buses so had a bit more solitude.

The moment that schools closed everything changed. Since then I have been in the same space as my partner and child for 24 hours a day with the exception of a few hours of exercise. Solitary walks are hard to achieve, though early mornings are possible. Solitary work has vanished because of parental responsibility – the loss of the disciplinary structure of school means for a good part of each day I feel responsible for making my young teen work.

Solitude on the street or in the park is now fraught with concerns about social distancing; it is rarely possible to just wander. I’ve reclaimed a solitary space in the early morning, with a firmly closed door.

My child also longs for solitude, which for them is mediated by technology: any interruption from a parent is irritating, and the independence of solitary travel is a kind of solitude that they have had removed. On the other hand, they are forced for the first time to do school work for hours at a time with no company, so a forced and deeply unwelcome solitude.

I experience solitude also second-hand, empathising with my mother, who is in her 90s living on her own with dementia. She was content to live alone until told that she could not go out and people could not visit. Now she is desperate for structure and company. So she has lost the experience of solitude for one of loneliness and being unmoored.

I’m a woman in my early fifties.

4.

Before COVID-19, working as a teacher in a busy school and spending the majority of my free time with my husband, travelling across the country to spend time with family and friends, I don’t feel I experienced solitude a great deal. Spending so much time with other adults and children and keeping to a busy schedule meant I longed for solitude. I looked forward to my lonely runs and nights when my husband stayed away due to work commitments.

I initially struggle with change, so I was anxious about lockdown, but I found a new fitness routine, was given new ways to work and tried to make time at home fun. Staying at home with just my husband was a relief. Not being allowed to travel or attend events, gave us time back to slow down and removed social pressures, allowing us to spend quality time together.

I now worry about life going back to some form of normality and having to share my husband and our time again.

It is in my work life where I have experienced the most solitude. I am used to spending my day with 30 children, various members of support staff and in constant contact with outside agencies and parents/careers. My school decided we would not conduct online/video lessons but set work, which would be available each day on our school website.

Asking questions and setting work to no response has been tough, as I am used to adapting second by second to what the children do and say. I have felt lonely, sat at home on my computer waiting and hoping to receive emails from my children with pictures of their work. Sadly, only a small percentage of my class have been able to be in regular contact, which also means I have worried about their physical and mental health and how they are dealing with their solitude.

I do miss my own family and friends and spending time with them, but have found I am speaking to some of them more than I ever have done before, so I do not feel as removed from them as I actually am. As restrictions begin to be lifted and friends and family are meeting for socially distanced walks, etc., I can see I am beginning to feel some solitude, as living so far from many of them means I cannot spend time with them physically at all and do not know when I will be able to.

I’m a teacher in my early thirties.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post With or Without You: Solitude and Family Life appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

1.

I have lived alone for 35 of my 76 years. Whilst I was working in a busy and demanding health related job, I welcomed my time alone in the evenings, although I always spent some evenings with friends or on activities that I enjoyed, and I normally went out of London at weekends, to be with family or friends.

With retirement, I realised that I would not be happy or mentally healthy if I did not interact with people frequently. And arranged my life so that I had lots of things to do, including church activities, school governorship, girlguiding and investigating family and local history. I have lived fairly happily in this way for 10 years.

The only times when I felt lonely, tended to be after spending time with family or friends, especially holiday times: on my return to my solitary home, it would take me some days to settle down and adjust to being alone again.

Lockdown has had a huge impact on me.  Unfortunately, I had a serious illness in March, which I have had to deal with alone.  (Normally a member of my family would have come to be with me and help me organise myself in a new situation). Of course, I have talked to family, friends and neighbours and have been very well supported. However, the lack of my regular contacts where I could talk face to face, maybe have a cup of tea or distract myself with a shared activity has been very debilitating.

Although I have used phone calls, Skype and Zoom to join up with people, and chatted on the doorstep, and this is very nice, it does not replace the real communication of meeting. I have tried to use music, radio and television to ease the loneliness, and they are of course, a help but not the same. Many people are worse off than me, but it has been and still is an extremely lonely challenging time.

A regular routine has been advised for us all, and should help one’s stability, but the tedious round of daily routine can become self-defeating.  Although I long for life to return to some more normal pattern, I also worry that I will have lost the confidence to communicate easily with other people.

I’m a 76-year-old woman living in London.

2.

Before the pandemic, I felt lonely whenever I was alone and unoccupied for a few hours. I had a childish fear of being alone with my own thoughts and not having anything to distract myself. Since the lockdown, I’ve had to spend a lot more time alone, of course, and I’ve been surprised to find that I’m okay. After an initial flurry of contact from friends who were worried about how I’d be coping (I have a reputation for being extremely sociable!) I have settled into a calmer life.

Now, solitude has become more of a physical issue. I have virtual contact at work and with friends, so I don’t feel particularly isolated. But I envy characters on TV who can touch, I hug my friends in my dreams at night, and I find myself suddenly desolate after joyful video calls because I cannot sit next to my friend on a sofa in a pub.

I’m a 29-year-old woman.

3.

Solitude meant (and still to an extent means) the sense of being apart. I am almost never literally alone – I live, work and holiday in cities, and it is rare to be out of earshot of someone else entirely. But those lives are not intersecting with mine. Before COVID, I often dreaded long weekends, 3 days in which I might not have a conversation with anyone else. I’d restart the working week disoriented to interaction with others.

COVID has strangely made this easier: I’m no longer the only person who has experienced being alone within almost-touching distance of others.

I used to feel that my (pretty regular and positive) online engagements didn’t really count, whereas now almost everyone has come to value distant interaction. There has been more of it, for me – more people have noticed that I am alone, and worried about it, rather than assuming I am doing it by choice.

It has been interesting to contrast my negative feelings about isolation before the lockdown or on bad days in lockdown with a friend who likewise lives alone and had a very busy life before COVID, but who is perfectly unmoved by lockdown and doing fine, not missing anyone. I don’t have that mindset – I do miss people.

I’ve been in a long-term long-distance relationship for many years; it’s not perfect, but good when we see one another. So solitude in lockdown meant knowing we simply couldn’t meet for months. In one way, we’re very good at communicating at a distance. In another way, it was a dramatic, forcible separation.

He’d given me a stuffed animal a few months earlier (most uncharacteristic for both of us, really a joke impulse buy) and for the early weeks of lockdown it became a totem of his presence with me, which both of us referred to as comforting. I’m glad to say that has worn off a bit as lockdown has got more familiar and less stringent; I’m not talking to stuffed animals any more.

I’m 45 and live in London.

4.

Solitude before COVID seemed more peaceful and relaxing. Now it seems like the worst thing in the world as it is not through choice any more. I live alone so I have never had a problem with being alone but knowing I have to stay alone makes it worse. I think being in solitude through choice was okay because if I decided I wanted to see others and spend time with people, I could do so. Now I don’t like not knowing when I can next have be people over, or go and see friends and family. I feel more lonely now knowing that the other people I know aren’t in lockdown alone. I don’t know anybody else who is currently alone.

I used to have my work routine so would spend all day talking to people but now I can only speak to people over the phone or at a distance in their garden.

I’m 25-years-old and live alone in an apartment.

Our project is very grateful to everyone who took the time to tell us about their experiences. We are still collecting solitude testimonies for our project. If you would like to contribute, please click here to be taken to our survey. 

The post ‘Within Almost-Touching Distance’: Solitude and Physical Isolation appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

As researchers on solitude, we have come to think of solitude and sociality as co-dependent. Our experiences of solitude are shaped by our experiences of social connection and vice versa. Here I offer some reflections on my own experiences, living with two others in London, and how it has got me thinking about the solitude and sociality of life in the time of COVID-19.

Work

For someone whose job revolves around very solitary practices of reading and writing, one might imagine that a lockdown should be a time of great productivity. But in the first few weeks of the pandemic I was struck by how hard it was to maintain focus. I am used to working from home, but rarely for an entire day, preferring instead to spread my working hours across two, three or sometimes four locations, making use of my home, my office at Queen Mary, as well as London’s numerous libraries and cafes. Such spaces serve different practical function in terms of the books, resources, comfort and caffeine on offer.

But living in lockdown has also emphasised the unacknowledged sociality of these places and the extent to which I lean on them to feed off the productivity, surveillance, support and conviviality of others.

They bring to mind our colleague Leo Coleman’s descriptions of urban solitude and the ways in which cities offer opportunities, in Coleman’s words, to ‘be alone with others’. Many of these moments – our daily commute, solitary lunch breaks, times spent reading in parks etc – may not appear social on the surface but offer an opportunity to be with others in an anonymous but no less present way.

When walking or running in the park I have been surprised how rejuvenating the presence of strangers has been. Now that the British people have been afforded ‘unlimited’ sunbathing and exercise, our local park has been busier than ever. Though I can’t relocate my desk there, it has become by far the most significant public space in my life and I’m glad for the abundance of others.

Difficulties in maintaining concentration have undoubtedly been compounded by news and anxiety about the pandemic in the outside world. This is after all a crisis in the age of the ‘attention economy’ and the devices which allow us to work from home are also portals to endless updates, analyses, dire predictions and accounts of suspicious visits to Barnard Castle. Though it is important to stay informed, it is easy to forget how the live feeds compete for our attention in ways that can be extremely counterproductive.

In How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, artist Jenny Odell argues that the attention economy is not only a drain on our capacity to concentrate but also a threat to our sense of self and even free will.

‘Its not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without wilful thought and action is an impoverished one,’ Odell writes, ‘a social body that can’t concentrate or communicate is like a person who can’t think and act.’

Odell’s antidote to the attention economy is to carve out space for what she calls ‘deep attention’, to become engrossed not with a single task or problem per say but rather to a sense of space, community and local ecology. One of the pleasures of lockdown has certainly been the numerous discoveries made around our local area, including skateparks, orchards, swan’s nests and more. But learning to disconnect from the news cycle was as much a process of adaptation to the new normal than newfound powers of deep attention. Productivity, as ever, has come in waves rather than any constant flow.

Sociality

Outside of work hours, life in lockdown has been far from solitary. Video-calling technology is hardly new, but until now I have only used it sparingly. The surge in popularity of platforms such as Zoom and Houseparty have in no way superseded what me might call ‘traditional’ image and text based social media. These still run apace.

But instead the conference call has often stood in as proxy for conventional social gatherings. Afterwork drinks on a Friday, coffee breaks, Sunday lunch, boardgames, parties, birthdays, music festivals have all been attempted with remarkable ingenuity and varying success. My housemates and I have discovered the pleasures of dancing at a laptop screen until the early hours of the morning and seeing people halfway across the world doing the same.

Such activities seem to blur the lines between solitary and shared experience, offering a unique situation where we experience something of the world of the other, but are excluded from many aspects of a truly shared environment: the atmosphere of a room, sideways glances, cross-conversation, the touch and feel of others. I’m interested in this simulacrum of normality and the ways in which social conventions have evolved to replicate the old whilst accommodating the new.

As restrictions have eased, enthusiasm for digital socialising seems to be waning, but I often wonder how these technologies will be integrated into our lives post lockdown. Will we still dial in our laptop-based friends once the pubs reopen?

Did someone mention the pub? For many, this social hub seems to play an important role in their collective imagination. A symbol of life before lockdown and a potential marker of a return to normalcy. Its immediate offering of food drink, friends and even strangers seem to be obvious.

But just as the Zoom call might make us aware of what we are missing, I wonder if the return to such places might engender a further awareness of those subtle elements which we have previously taken for granted, the sounds, smells and chance encounters of a busy room. But I suspect any potential ethnographers or phenomenologists of the pub experience will have to act quickly. One of the things about returning to normality is that its relative novelty is extremely short lived.

Solitude

I am fortunate enough to have spent lockdown in a house of three, with my partner and housemate. For the most part, we have synchronised into the rhythm of each other’s lives finding ways to occupy our free time, with food, games, sports, crafts and conversation.

As such, complete solitude has not been thrust upon us, but is something we all make time for.

Though the rare pleasure of having the house to oneself is only ever fleeting in lockdown, I find such moments are most enjoyable when they are the counterpoint to a busy and hectic life.

There hasn’t been much FOMO during lockdown, but this also negates the possibility of the joy of missing out. Some time alone has of course been necessary to navigate the extraordinary nature of the last few months and the varying emotions that come with it, but I am grateful to be able escape solitude as well as to retreat into it.

Our project recently sent out a call for public testimonies about solitude (if you’re interested in contributing, you can do so here) and I’m interested to discover more about the different ways in which people are experiencing the solitude and strange sociality of these times. For now at least, I certainly long for the company of a crowd over my own.

Charlie Williams is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post Pubs, Parks, Strangers and Strangeness appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Nothing so wild as time, I type into the Subject field in an email to a friend in South Africa. Time no longer feels tame, not even as a dog straining at the end of its leash and yanking me forward so fast I fail to see the world passing. It has never seemed as unpredictable as it does now: susceptible to being studied in long hours of apparent inactivity, days approachable in their static repose, until in a flash a minute opens its mouth to tear pages from the calendar.

And then, unannounced, the past returns, fresh as yesterday.

2.

Each day after lunch, we—my husband and I—walk in the playing fields of the school near our home in south-east London. We stopped going to the park down the road even before the lockdown because it had become too packed with runners and cyclists who kept heedlessly passing us only inches distant. Until there is a treatment or vaccine, I anticipate keeping to this habit. In the playing fields, surrounded by hedges and fences that seem to prevent most people realizing the school has opened its property to all, we feel a measure of security. It is possible to avoid the few others walking the perimeter, to plot a wide arc around the men who bring chrome dumbbells and grunt ostentatiously in the sun. Unlike the park, with its meandering paths and blind corners, here there is a sense of wide-open space—not in great abundance but enough to counter the pall of claustrophobia that begins to settle if we leave it even a day without stepping through the front door of our flat. It is not lost on me that we feel this sense of relative freedom only on enclosed private land, its gates now marked with two-meter-long banners reminding us to keep that distance, which some scientists are beginning to suggest is not nearly enough [1].

Still, these perambulations are insufficient. We come home and each spend an hour, every day, on the spin bike that now sits in the kitchen-dining room. We contort ourselves each morning for half an hour in front of a Yoga-with-Adriene session on YouTube. Without these periods of physical exertion that are also markers of time passing in the course of each day, giving it a recognizable shape and predictable structure, we have learned that time quickly turns feral. Days have been lost when I was meant to be reading Proust or working on a book project that now, in light of the crisis convulsing the world, seems to require if not a total re-conception of its aims, then at least a new process of explaining to myself what the temporal moment should be for a narrative about two strangers travelling together across America. Before the virus? Or after?

Is it defensible—either aesthetically or ethically—to write a story that was going to stage a crisis of the present without acknowledging the crisis I could not have foreseen when I started work on the book two years ago, a crisis that now alters nearly every aspect of human life?

Isolation (even together with one’s spouse, an enforced solitude-in-company) is not the problem. Since moving to Britain nearly nineteen years ago, this country has turned me into an isolate, someone who is happier alone or with one or two others; isolation has become a mode of psychological self-preservation. Groups exhaust and deplete me and I need to recharge for periods of time without having to speak to anyone but those who know me best. I am equipped for isolation and know how to thrive on it.

Rather, the creative problem is the uncertainty of this moment and its fast-slow violence, a violence of successive torturous marathons punctuated by sprints of exceptional savagery, a violence born from and marked by the collision of pandemic with political dysfunction, systemic collapse, nationalism, populism, late capitalism, the supremacy of the market. If we do not know how long this will last, or what the crisis will ultimately do to society for as long as the virus is with us, how can we predict what is likely to come after, if there is an after?

3.

As a way of trying to make sense of my own response to Covid-19, like so many others I have returned to literature that responds to past pandemics. American writer William Maxwell’s second book, They Came like Swallows (1937), published when he was twenty-nine, emerged from the loss of his mother in the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Organized in three sections, each focalized through a different character, the novel is a subtle meditation on the inescapability of solitude even when surrounded by one’s own family.

In its first part, told from the perspective of eight-year-old Peter ‘Bunny’ Morison, who we meet waking on the second Sunday in November 1918 in the bedroom he shares with his older brother, Robert, the novel lets us see how moments of affection that mark each day are the ordinary treasures Bunny values—as much as the Native American doll that sleeps beside him at night. Without needing to tell us explicitly, Maxwell trusts that this detail, the boy attached to a female doll, in combination with the child’s nickname, will communicate his otherness in a world of conventional gender roles and expectations.

Just as many of us now begin every communication with friends, family, and colleagues by asking hopeful questions about whether they and theirs are well, Bunny’s first interaction with his mother, Elizabeth, is a playful refrain of ‘How do you do?’ and ‘How do you do and how do you do again?’ [2]. Over the course of the novel, she and he will both fall ill with influenza. It is possible to read in Bunny’s question to his mother—the first words he speaks in the novel—a submerged anxiety about Elizabeth Morison’s condition from the moment we meet her. By November 1918, the pandemic was in its second wave, already squarely in the public consciousness across the United States, gripping cities like Philadelphia and Boston, New York and Chicago; in October, San Francisco had recommended that the public begin wearing masks [3].

Even after only a night apart, intimacy between child and mother is riven by concern about the health of the beloved who is embraced. But whatever anxiety Bunny may feel unconsciously is overwhelmed by enthusiasm for seeing his mother again, so much so that he ‘plant[s] a kiss somewhat wildly on her mouth’ [4]. In turn, his mother preoccupies herself with her youngest’s hygiene, holding him at a distance ‘to see whether he had washed thoroughly’; the anxiety for Elizabeth, in the third trimester of a pregnancy (as yet not revealed to Bunny), is whether the child wildly kissing her has cleaned himself adequately. Hygiene is the force driving characters’ isolation from one another as the novel unfolds [5].

Maxwell tells us that when Bunny and his mother are alone, there is a sense of the world being ‘intimate and familiar’, made so by their awareness of the other’s ‘presence’. In the absence of his mother, however, ‘nothing was real to Bunny—or alive’:

The vermilion leaves and yellow leaves folding and unfolding upon the curtains depended utterly upon his mother. Without her they had no movement and no color. [6]

For Bunny, true isolation occurs only when his mother is unreachable, and this results in the bleeding out of color and life, the greying of his world: play loses its imaginative force so that objects remain only themselves, incapable of transformation into more fantastic avatars.

The remaining two sections of the novel, told from the perspective of Bunny’s brother, Robert, and their father, James, demonstrate with cumulative force the impossibility for each of these characters of breaking out of their internal solitude in a moment in which enforced isolation due to illness is the sharpest marker of individual experience. If Bunny’s isolation turns his world monochromatic and insusceptible to imaginative transformation, isolation manifests for Robert as a struggle with being displaced from the family home when his parents leave town so that his mother can give birth attended by a specialist.

Removed from his friends, boarding with an unsympathetic paternal aunt and uncle whose lives are marked by such grotesqueries as a purely ornamental fireplace screwed to the wall, Robert succumbs to rumination. When Elizabeth falls ill and eventually dies after the birth of her baby, Robert fears that he, having failed to keep her away from Bunny when his little brother was at the height of his own illness, is responsible for her sickness. For Robert, genuine connection—for instance with his beloved maternal Aunt Irene—is represented only indirectly or in retrospect, and this tendency carries forward into the final section, seen through the eyes of the boys’ father, James.

It is as if age and masculinity are barriers to connection that harden over time, each male member of the Morison family legible in Freudian terms as exemplars of id, ego, and super ego, their psychological states, the ways in which they function both to themselves and in the world of the novel, tied to their relative place in life and within the structure of the family.

For James, grief is the isolating glass shield through which he can view his sisters-in-law and other relatives, as well as the sons who already seem fundamentally unknowable to him; he never achieves the kind of connection that remains possible, even if only fleetingly, for Bunny and Robert. Company is not necessarily an antidote to solitude; if anything, in Maxwell’s novel company produces—for Robert and James—a stronger sense of isolation and alienation than being alone with one’s thoughts and emotions, however troubled and deranging these may prove.

4.

I first read William Maxwell after moving from New York to Oxford for graduate school. Like me, Maxwell was a child of the Midwest who, in early adulthood, left to live elsewhere. Born and raised in Illinois, he later made his life in New York, but much of his fiction remains preoccupied with the sparsely populated towns of middle America in the first half of the twentieth century, the towns that were themselves spread thinly across the Great Plains, cropping up out of windbreaks, near riverbends, along train lines, settled in the nineteenth century by Germans and Scandinavians who brought to the deceptively unremarkable landscape of flatlands and gently rolling hills a quietist approach to daily life and civic planning. It is a landscape given to isolation, one that can produce fruitful introspection as much as crippling loneliness.

A year before moving to Britain, on a warm New York day in September 2000, I left work at 57^th Street and 8^th Avenue in Manhattan and took the subway up to St. John the Divine, where I met my roommate, a recently retired ballet dancer, to attend a joint memorial service for Maxwell and his wife, the painter Emily Maxwell. Both had died earlier in the summer, eight days apart. We were there not because we knew either of them but because the Maxwells were friends of my roommate’s aunt, my childhood acting teacher in Omaha, who was unable to make the trip.

We found a place near the back of the cathedral, listened to the eulogies, and stood with everyone at the end of the service to sing ‘Don’t Fence Me In’. My grandmother, the same age as Maxwell, had died in June, and when I sang Cole Porter’s ersatz cowboy tune it was as much for my grandmother as for the Maxwells. I was not present at her death; it came too suddenly, and over the course of the summer the grief had proved, at times, almost unmanageable. When she went into the hospital I had failed to fly out to California and even in our last conversation on the phone did not allow myself to believe she would actually succumb to the cancer consuming her.

For the Maxwells, such fixtures of New York life (William Maxwell was for decades a revered fiction editor at The New Yorker), the seemingly eccentric choice of song to close their memorial service was testament not only to a lingering desire for the wide open spaces of the American west that belonged to their youth, but also to the positive force of solitude:

‘Let me be by myself in the evening breeze / And listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees’.

While solitude can exacerbate grief and anxiety—as is now all too apparent—it nonetheless contains within it the possibility for different kinds of connection and reflection.

5.

To be isolated from the beloved in a moment of global crisis is to make the ordinary solitude of existence—the solitude one feels even in company, the solitude of feeling out of step, in a different key—all the more acute, and painful. For Maxwell’s Bunny Morison, that sense of alienation appears rooted in his bookishness and the absence of stereotypical boyishness. For Robert, it is marked on the body, in an amputated leg lost to an earlier accident, which makes his father view him as less robust than the boy believes and strives to prove himself to be.

I returned to Maxwell’s novel after nearly two decades not only because I remembered it being about the earlier pandemic, but because I recalled the consolation it seemed to offer in the moment I first discovered it, when I felt as though I should not be as alienated by the move to Britain as I was, and when I was still trying to process the loss of my grandmother. The American literature I had largely eschewed in favor of British writers suddenly felt like the culturally familiar comforter I needed in an environment where fellow British students mocked my accent and pretended not to understand what I was saying.

Alienation of place, the sense of being removed and out of step, of coming from somewhere else culturally, even ideologically (in my case a New York that I can now no longer reach with any great ease), produces a sense of solitude so profound it can feel deranging.

As my husband can no longer easily reach the South Africa where his aging mother lives alone, so I cannot easily travel to the New York where mine also lives alone. Certainly, we could each fly to our respective countries and submit to two-week quarantines, but the risk of undertaking such trips militates against all but emergency travel. We know that we are hardly unique in this respect, but that does not mean the separation from our closest family members is any easier to bear, and it can make the time feel as endless as it does vanishingly short. Like Maxwell’s characters, we have no choice but to embrace solitude and isolation from our beloveds as a protective measure, one in which we can but hope it may prove possible to hear murmurs of different origin and register than those we are used to admitting.

[1] See Jad Abumrad, host, ‘Dispatch 4: Six Feet’, Radiolab, WNYC Studios, 11 April 2020.

[2] William Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows (1937; London: The Harvill Press, 2002), 5.

[3] For a timeline of the 1918 Pandemic, see: 1918 Pandemic Influenza Historic Timeline, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. Responses to public health initiatives to limit the spread of influenza in 1918 were as mixed as they are today; these included an ‘Anti-Mask League’ in San Francisco. See Nancy K. Bristow, ‘What the 1918 flu pandemic tells us about whether social distancing works’, The Guardian, 29 April 2020.

[4] Maxwell, They Came Like Swallows, 5.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid., 11.

Patrick Flanery is a novelist and Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. His most recent work includes the novel Night for Day (2019) and the creative-critical book The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption (2019). 

The post Fence Me In appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

You humans are used to milling about together, pressing up against each other in crowded rooms, putting on little performances for applause and admiration. And now you can’t do this—at least not in the usual ways. You as a species are uniquely afflicted at this time, and you find some consolation in watching cats crammed together in cages, performing tricks, letting humans walk them on leads. The logic of your world has been inverted, and you are drawn into an upside down feline world, where we cats are stripped of the dignity of our solitude. I know some of you clever ones are about to say—lions!—but those of you who have been reading the blogs on this website will know that solitude is not simply a matter of being alone.

I will forgive you this Katzenschadenfreude. Now that you, like Bustopher Jones, can no longer be the cat about town, visiting your eight or nine clubs in your well-cut trousers and white spats, I have decided to step out of my usual reticence and write to you. As an indoor house cat, I have no pawcity of thoughts on the matters with which you are now struggling -time by yourselves, self-care, naps, living from meal to meal. So here are my first thoughts:

1. Do not be ashamed of your pleasure in biscuits.

I live for my morning biscuits, my night-time biscuits, and when I’m lucky, my tea-time biscuits. But I watch you humans, and you’re more and more like me as regards biscuits, but then you call your friends and say ‘oh I’m eating so many biscuits’ and you try to put the biscuit tin on the highest shelf and you drink nothing but water for half a day. Why is your pleasure so tied up in guilt? No wonder you find your solitude difficult, you are always measuring yourselves against ideals of biscuit-denial.

Now we cats, unlike humans, have no nasty inner voice, like Socrates’s daemon, saying ‘must not’, ‘should not’, ‘no, no, no’. I’m sure you’ve never heard a cat berate itself. And that is why we can spend hours in our own company. Of course, we’re interested in other cats (and people) when they come along, but we’re not relying on them to protect us from the internal biscuit-eating harangue. Want to think more about this? If you’re inclined to take the words of people more seriously than thoughts from this humble cat of letters, you could start by reading ‘Against Self-Criticism’ by Adam Phillips.

2. Butterflies (and moths and flies and spiders) are interesting.

I like spiders. And moths. Sometimes I chase them. Sometimes I catch them and eat them. But most often, I just watch. The other day I was reading a book (yes, I do sometimes read books, though I am more inclined to take naps on them) where a woman compares the thoughts at the back of her mind to ‘butterflies’, their movements like ‘a little flitting of birds’. Thinking, she finds, is being ‘a still watcher in woods’. She may as well have said: to think, become a cat.

What I’m trying to say is that there is quite lot of wildlife in the great indoors, and you can go on a perfectly interesting safari in the back of your mind. If you humans had figured this out earlier you wouldn’t have to go about building cages like Joe Exotic (and don’t even get me started on Doc Antle) or holding rallies so that you’re allowed your constitutional freedom to spread a deadly virus. Sorry to digress. Did I say I didn’t like Tiger King?

3. Thresholds are bae.

Have you ever opened a door to let a cat in, only for it to want to go out again? Has a belly rub turned into a scratched hand? Left a window open because the front paws wanted to be outside and the back paws inside? Yes, and then you’ve complained about the fickleness of cats. We’re not fickle, we’re just better than you at knowing and saying that we want more than one thing at the same time and some of these things we want can be contradictory and opposed. And you’re not that different.

I know you’re all complaining about this lockdown but are also super glad you don’t have to go to three-hour meetings and take the rush hour tube. Well perhaps your new-found solitude can be an opportunity to develop a taste for paradox. Not least because of the ways in which human solitude lends itself to paradox—thinking about being alone means thinking of what it means to be connected, the voices of others are sometimes at their loudest when you are by yourself, crowds can reinforce loneliness. A rather nice man (he sometimes turned his signature into a drawing of a cat) once said that ‘paradox, once accepted and tolerated, has value for every human individual’. I think what he meant to say was, please leave that door open for the cat. And for those of you haven’t caught up yet, ‘bae’ means ‘before anything else’.

4. The pig dreams of acorns, the goose of maize.

Or so said Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. What do cats dream of? We’re asleep eighteen hours of the day. We’re doing the difficult work, thinking the hard to bear stuff. Dream work is hard work. And we’re crepuscular, witness to the melancholy of dusk and dawn.

If you don’t believe me (I know some of you may be too stuck in your ways to take this humble cat of letters seriously), listen to the poet Eunice D’Souza. She called the poem ‘Advice to Women’ even though it is relevant to everyone. It’s just that she was a feminist and only wanted to pass on her wisdom to women, given that men had the benefits of the patriarchy and all that:

Keep cats
if you want to learn to cope with
the otherness of lovers.
Otherness is not always neglect –
Cats return to their litter trays
when they need to.
Don’t cuss out of the window
at their enemies.
That stare of perpetual surprise
in those great green eyes
will teach you
to die alone.

Ok, Eunice thinks we cats know about the difficult things like separation and loss of love and death. So this literary feline would like to say that in this time, when you’re confronted with separation and loss and death, it is ok to need to sleep ten or fourteen or eighteen hours. And if you find yourselves up at the crack of dawn, and the biscuit tin is empty, and you’re thinking the hard thoughts, then know that we cats are thinking them with you.

5. Social Housing and Litter Trays for All.

Look I may be a humble cat of letters but I still have my litter tray and some stairs where I can rip the carpet.

There is no point in talking about the pleasures of paradox and the possibilities of solitude when you don’t have a safe place to stay and a reliable supply of biscuits and a little patch of sunshine. I can offer you my feline reflections on solitude, but you humans also need to be thinking about the most unjust forms of isolation that you’ve created in your society. And to be tolerant of everyone’s different capacities at this time. I like what Karl said: ‘from each according to his abilities, and to each according to his kneads’; or as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it (more or less):

Rise like Cats after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.

Benji Franklin (@benjamin_franco_franklin) is the feline-in-residence on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

The post Feline Reflections on Lockdown appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Hopefully it is more than just a compilation, as I have tried to emphasise common themes and ideas in this kind of cinema. Beginning with a general sense of misanthropy, I then show some of the apparent pleasures of self-sufficiency (exercising, hobbies), but these soon give way to a pervasive and wretched loneliness. The essay ends by passing through a kind of ultimate solitude and into quiet relief at the merest possibility of companionship. This narrative was suggested by the texts themselves, but also by current events – indeed, the concerns drawn out of the films in the essay seem much more relevant now than last year. Isolation is on all of our minds, and I have tried to tease out some of the ways these films think about disconnection, self-care, and boredom.

But if these issues might now seem more universal, then the specific emphasis on male experience found in the essay is not. Rather than try to deconstruct the self-serving mythos of the heroically suffering man, or to highlight it even further by removing clips from Gravity (2013), I hope that the concluding seconds of exhaustion go some way toward undercutting this masculinist pathos. After all, under present conditions the thought of actually choosing such an aggressively solitary existence seems like the most outlandish kind of science fiction.

Nick Jones (@nphjones) is Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. His next major book, Spaces Mapped and Monstrous, is forthcoming in 2020.

The post Further Thoughts on Cosmic Emptiness appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

It can be no less distressing for other residents of care homes who can hear and see in the media their enormous risk of death due to the government’s failure to provide testing for the virus or adequate protective equipment for them and their carers. Worse, they may know of friends dying within the care home, and they can themselves be refused the hospital care available to younger people if they contract the virus, though care homes can rarely provide the necessary medical treatment. Some homes are asking residents to sign ‘do not resuscitate’ documents, deepening their fears and feelings of neglect.

Discrimination against ‘the elderly’, the outdated term that is relentlessly used, is nothing new.

Those who think and care about them refer to ‘older people’, implying human diversity rather than a stereotyped, undifferentiated bloc above a certain age. In the current crisis, discrimination has been particularly blatant in government policy and some medical responses. The first official move was to tell everyone over 70 they were the group most susceptible to the virus and must self-isolate, as though all the millions past that age were equally frail and vulnerable. This was a severe shock to the very many fit and active people past 70, myself included.

Among other errors, it failed to recognize potential losses to the community if we all heeded it. There is justified congratulation of the numbers of people coming forward with voluntary support of those in isolation and in need, but it is little recognized how many people over 70 have been volunteering such support to their neighbours and others for decades, which will be lost if they withdraw into isolation. Very many older people are not frail dependents but invaluable contributors to their families and communities.

In normal times, people aged 65-74 are the most likely age group in UK to engage in voluntary work. They feel fit and active after retirement and want to be useful, and they have time, as younger people have now but usually do not.

28% of 65-74s volunteered regularly in 2018/19 and surveys show similar figures for the previous 20 years.

They help others formally through voluntary organisations, while many more do so informally, caring for relatives, friends and neighbours, often relieving those risking loneliness in solitude. They have been needed all the more following ‘austerity’ cuts to social and other public services.

These supposedly ‘vulnerable’ older people are keeping many public libraries open, and more and more people in their 60s and 70s care for parents in their 80s and 90s, or for frail partners or disabled adult children, often experiencing severe stress as supportive care services dwindle.

Over 2m older people in UK provide unpaid care; 400,000 are over 80, 1 in 7 of all people over 80. They are estimated to save the state £25bn pa in costs of caring services. 65% of grandparents care for grandchildren to help their children work, often giving up their own work to do so. I in 3 working mothers rely on support from grandparents due to the increasing costs of childcare.

And growing numbers of older people volunteer for overseas charities. Voluntary Service Overseas was established in 1956 to enable young people to volunteer in low-income countries after leaving school or university. Now they increasingly recruit older people.

In the 1980s only 3% of their volunteers were aged 50 or over, by 2008 they were 28%.

I don’t have more recent figures, though they are likely to have risen. As teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, among others, they provide considerably more skill and experience to low-income countries than most younger people. Thus many older people avoid loneliness and alleviate that of others less active or fortunate than themselves, as part of their normal lives.

As this health crisis has progressed ,official edicts have changed and begun to recognize diversity among older people, that those with ‘underlying health conditions’ of any age are most in danger, not everyone over the arbitrary age of 70. It has become obvious that many younger people are dying, especially medical workers exposed by being inadequately protected, BAME people disproportionately, and men more than women. But the initial alerts have left many older people seriously frightened, afraid to leave their homes, not allowed to receive visitors, not always competent with technology to contact friends and relatives, experiencing solitude as fear and loneliness.

But if healthy older people have been delivered a bad time by government COVID policies, frailer people are having it worse. They will hear in the media that some hospital doctors refuse advanced treatment to save the lives of people past 70. The health service has a long history of such discrimination, judging older lives less worth saving than those of the young because they have few years left to live. They fail to recognize how many people are now living longer in good health, with potential for years of life at least as useful as many younger people. Sometimes doctors may act in desperation, forced to make hard choices because of overload of patients and/or inadequate facilities but, still, such discrimination is unacceptable.

Many doctors recognize this and, after much criticism, it now appears to be official policy to judge all patients by their state of health and potential for recovery regardless of age.

A possible good outcome of this crisis would be if it finally alerted us to the extent of discrimination against older people and its harmful effects. For decades, social care of older and disabled people has been under-funded and inadequate, especially since cuts and privatization by Thatcher in the 1980s, continued under ‘austerity’ since 2010. This now leaves many people isolated at home or stuck in hospital beds because there is no space in care homes.

Repeatedly since 1948, when present structures were established, official and unofficial critics have urged integration of universal, free health care and means-tested, locally variable, social care services into a free, adequately funded, service to give frail older people the care they need and deserve. But they have been persistently ignored by successive governments refusing priority to the needs of older and disabled people.

Many people are frightened and disturbed by the COVID crisis, but older people have reason to fear it most, due at least as much to government and medical policy and practice as to the virus itself, adding to the danger of depression in self-isolation. Even if they try to cheer themselves by escaping for the permitted daily walk, the benches in the local park may be roped off, for fear that sitting somehow encourages contagion.

Older people may need to rest on a half-hour healthy walk, but again their needs were forgotten, deemed less important than others, heightening fears of marginalization and isolation, the worst kind of solitude. Then, at last, on 17th April, following protest, senior police announced that ‘it is acceptable for a person to stop for a break in exercise’. Let’s hope it makes life easier for some people.

Pat Thane is a Visiting Professor in History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has written extensively on old age and ageing, including Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000).

The post COVID-19 – Killing Off Older People? appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

Visible gestures of generosity, such as volunteers assisting isolated elderly citizens or neighbours picking up supplies for one another, help us feel emotionally connected when direct personal contact is severely restricted.

Yet, counter-intuitively, the current situation may also require us to maintain distance, not just in the physical sense but also in interpersonal and emotional relations. There is a risk of compensating for the current sense of crisis and isolation with too much closeness at both a private and social level. And this too can have problematic consequences.

***

In his 1924 essay The Limits of Community, the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner suggests that establishing interpersonal distance between individuals is the key for a well-functioning society. At the same time, these distancing practices need to be smoothed over by conventional codes of conduct. Of course, the distance we are currently concerned with is the six feet of physical separation needed to protect ourselves and others from infection. But this bodily experience of apartness has wider implications for our practices of cohabitation.

Everyday now, we have to negotiate new rules for interpersonal interaction: what used to be a gesture of kindness, such as guiding an elderly person through a busy intersection, may now put the same person at risk.

Foregoing the handshake is more polite than offering it.

Crossing over to the other side of the road can now be seen as a sign of respect rather than an expression of animosity. Besides the unease that the pandemic itself inevitably brings, it is this disruption of everyday conventions that brings out feelings of unsettledness and irritability.

As this state of exception threatens to become the new normal, we will require new conduct codes, as Plessner would say, new forms of tact, in order to ease these feelings, to compensate for the new distancing practices, and to make our minimal contact with strangers bearable. And we will also have to think about more distanced or ‘tactful’ ways to communicate, in order to minimize the ‘contagion of fear’.

Fear and isolation do not go well together. When we are feeling anxious about something, the advice is often to find a person we trust and to talk it out. How helpful such a conversation can be, depends in large part on whether the other person is able to meet us in our state of fear. The sociologist Richard Sennett distinguishes here between sympathy and empathy:

while sympathy is eliminating the distance between self and other through an act of identification (‘putting oneself in the other’s shoes’), empathy is a more distanced attitude that is necessary to meet the other person on their own terms.

But when our fear is not tied to individual circumstances, it becomes harder to find listeners able to maintain this right balance between distance and closeness. During the pandemic, most of us will experience varying degrees of fear. It is certainly not helpful to go through these feelings alone. Finding and giving support within our social circles is absolutely vital. But we have to be aware of the fact that fear, just like the virus itself, is extremely contagious.

This is not to make an argument for aseptic relationships. It is, however, a reason to think carefully about how we deal with our own fear and that of others. How do we create conversations that will help one person talk about their fear but won’t leave the other depleted and overcome by fear in turn? The fact that we are all affected by the pandemic can – and does – create new forms of solidarity and connectedness. But it can also lead to the individual and collective experience of being overwhelmed and paralysed by fear. This is dangerous because fear makes us turn inward, focus on what’s close to us, and consumes a large part of our empathic energy.

***

Our feelings of fear and our ability to feel empathy are inextricably linked to the experience of spatial and cultural distance. As the psychologist Paul Bloom has argued in his book Against Empathy (2016), it is far easier to feel empathy for those closest to us and, importantly, for those whom we recognise as more vulnerable and less scary. But who counts as vulnerable, and who is deemed to be scary?

Fear, as Sara Ahmed suggests in her 2004 study The Cultural Politics of Emotions, operates as a cultural-political practice: it establishes distance between individuals who are racially marked as ‘other’ and the proximity relationships within a majority white society. Fear of infection, in particular, has a long history of racially-charged exclusionary distancing practices that also have become apparent in the current pandemic.

From violent verbal and physical attacks on people of Asian descent in many countries to the president of the United States insisting on referring to the coronavirus as ‘the Chinese virus’, we are experiencing how the fear of infection tends to fuel racist language and actions.

Research by those such as historian Philip Sarasin on the politics of infection has shown that viruses were being imagined as ‘evil invaders’ or ‘invisible enemies’, and conflated with entire social and ethnic groups, by the end of the nineteenth century. The idea that pathogens could cross all socially constructed borders and infect individuals from all social classes and ethnic backgrounds did not inspire a politics of equality and solidarity at the time. Rather, the transgressive quality and the invisibility of germs became linked to an imagination of boundaries, of their potential permeability, and of the need to defend them.

In the current media coverage of the pandemic, we encounter once again an increasing use of war metaphors. Of course, the efforts to make citizens comply to governmental guidelines of social distancing and self-isolation are undoubtedly to be supported; and appealing to a sense of community may convince people to accept necessary restrictions of their individual freedom. But militaristic metaphors for the virus tend to merge the individual and the nation, which may increase solidarity within the national community, but inevitably fuels the fear of and aggression toward the ‘foreign other’.

While governments all over the world ask their citizens to show one another kindness and generosity, many nations close their borders and suspend existing programmes for asylum seekers. The fear of contagion and the need to seek comfort in the closeness of the community can therefore become politically exploited in order to legitimize exclusionary distancing practices.

***

Can a focus on our shared vulnerability enforce a more inclusive and less territorial sense of connectedness and solidarity? There is certainly something hopeful about the idea that the virus could make us somehow kinder, more loving, and more connected, especially amidst all the suffering, anxiety, and grief it is creating, and despite the long periods of social distancing and isolation it requires. Of course, there is nothing wrong with focusing on kindness in these challenging times.

At a personal level, connecting with our actual loved ones and building new support networks in our communities will be essential to get us through this crisis. But if we are hoping that the pandemic could bring about a more global sense of solidarity, the ‘power of love’ may not be the answer.

Feeling love beyond our closest relationships is only possible through acts of identification which are likely to take on tribal or even totalitarian forms.

Judith Butler’s recent work is concerned with the formulation of a new ethics based on our interdependency. And perhaps the reversibility of proximity and distance that the pandemic has brought on – ‘elsewhere’ is now ‘here’ – could inform a new ethics and even more crucially a new politics of cohabitation. Significantly, accepting our global interdependence does not mean that we must have the same emotional response to distant strangers that we have to those closest to us.

Butler argues that it is precisely the involuntary nature of our global interdependency that engenders ‘obligations to preserve the lives of those we may not love, those we may never love, do not know, and did not choose’.

Her point is that the constant political denial of this interdependency makes it possible to ignore the ethical obligations that emerge from it. For the current moment, the pandemic has suspended this ongoing denial.

Don’t get me wrong: it is wonderful that we are singing from our balconies, clapping for healthcare professionals, and have our kids paint ‘thank you’ signs for delivery drivers.

However, we have to recognize these gestures as momentary emotional damage control that is not sustainable. After the first shock of this global health crisis, we can take the opportunity to take a step back.

Whether it is the Western colonial arrogance towards China and other countries, harrowing funding cuts and privatization of national health care systems, the obliteration of paid sick leave in many low-income jobs, or neglect and isolation of the elderly – we will be able to recognize the ethical and political failures  that the persistent denial of our local and global interdependency has produced and that the pandemic has laid bare.

Marie Kolkenbrock (@M_Kolkenbrock) is a Branco Weiss Fellow in the Department of German at King’s College London.

The post Too Far, and Yet Too Close? appeared first on Solitudes: Past and Present.

To begin with, it implies a heightened urgency, a quantitative or qualitative shift in experiences. There is no clear evidence that this is true. Indeed, past societies framed their own anxieties about loneliness in strikingly similar ways. ‘Crisis’ also implies a moment of political and cultural flux, charged with transformative potential, whether good or bad.

The reality of loneliness over the last century is far more endemic and insidious. It has been visible (to the non-lonely, at least) in a series of fits and starts, with each generation of scrutiny and practice complicated and altered by a raft of historical contingencies; austerity policies or changing technologies being perhaps the most obvious. Attention wanes, empathy fades, and new ‘crises’ rise to the forefront of our consciousness. Most people have fundamentally made an uncomfortable peace with a world in which many other people are lonely, even if they work to mitigate that loneliness. It is no longer new, and rarely outrageous. It is usually just numbingly sad. With no crisis, no change. There never has been a moment in which anything could meaningfully and substantively change for the better.

There has already been much written on loneliness and COVID-19. My intention is not to replicate that valuable work. What is clear is that something very much like a genuine loneliness crisis is in the process of unfolding; in terms of severity, visibility, and the possibility for transformation. This crisis is caused by the COVID-19 epidemic, but is rooted in pre-existing contexts and histories, and entangled with both in messy and complicated ways. What I want to do here is to think through some of the more under-discussed implications of that entanglement, and begin to consider some potential responses. The intention is to move past some of the more usual points about the ill-effects of self-isolation and social distancing, or the good we can do by volunteering, checking in on people, and being kinder. Each of these are important conversations to have, but circumstances dictate that we need to go deeper.

***

Loneliness is endemic in society and has been for a very long time. This is the lens through which the current crisis has to be viewed. Understandably, there has been considerable discussion about who we might term the newly lonely, or newly at risk: previously well-connected people now having to wrangle with the very serious challenges posed by enforced isolation. There has also been increasing recognition that vulnerability to the effects of COVID-19 often coincides with vulnerability to loneliness, older adults being a case in point.

Chronic illness, disability, and homelessness each bring these two risks into similar proximity. There is a qualitative difference in how the COVID-19 crisis is experienced by people who have a reasonable chance of dying or becoming gravely ill. It is not just a global emergency, it is a direct, existential threat.

Regrettably, successful prevention of COVID-19 requires medium-term behavioural changes which make loneliness far more likely. This is (or should be) a relatively straightforward sacrifice to make for people who, mindful that some may die, suspect that they will probably be able to manage or mitigate these changes in one way or another.

When we consider loneliness as an endemic, pre-existing phenomenon, however, things become muddier. There are many people, including those to whom COVID-19 is an existential threat, who are unable to bear the possibility of feeling even lonelier than they already do. Loneliness has been an existential threat to them for a long time, and may provoke far more fear and anxiety than the possibility of infection.

In a situation where everything seems to shift from moment to moment, it can be difficult to get to grips with divergent temporalities. There are many people for whom the broad, public, collective timeline of COVID-19, the period in which it is understood as a global emergency, marks neither the beginning nor the end of their loneliness. It will certainly condition and alter it, and may even make some aspects more bearable. In my work on loneliness among university students with the sociologist Charlotte Jones, the students frequently speak about the yawning gulf between expectations and reality, and the shame and fear that everybody else is living this hyper-social, gregarious cliché. Suffering is individualised and compartmented, rendered personal when it should be political. At a time where experiences of isolation are at least superficially collective, this dimension could be dramatically lessened.

The solidarity and creativity stemming from this collective trauma, too, might well be of use. It may also be jarring to see neighbours who were previously distant offering support, or colleagues adopt strategies and technologies for communication which could have made a real difference earlier on. It will certainly be galling to worry that these things won’t last, to have little trust in their longevity beyond the immediate perception of need.

It is intolerable to put people with lived experience or heightened risk of serious loneliness in isolation without direct engagement with what that might mean to them and how it might be managed. Isolation in Britain is now compulsory, and the police have been granted powers to enforce it. Particularly now, there needs to be an immediate recognition that some people will find the government’s instructions almost impossible to comply with.

Not everybody who tries to maintain or replicate a semblance of their usual routine is selfish. For many, contact with friends or family members, the occasional drip of passing interaction, even just being around other people and feeling part of a shared humanity, can be a lifeline with vital psychological significance. Our response is that they should stay at home anyway – given the circumstances, this is broadly correct. But this has to come with the mindfulness that in some instances we are asking people to face unimaginable pain and suffering, and be accompanied by the all-important question: what can be done?

I don’t want to frame loneliness as a barrier to the effective containment of COVID-19. That positioning has the potential to do sinister work. The point is that nobody should ever have to choose between isolation which is unbearable and their ethical responsibility to avoid contact with others in a pandemic. Unbearable loneliness, which many people can expect to feel over the coming months, has a series of possible outcomes. It could cause them to break their isolation – sit in judgement on that if you can. It could also cause a rapid deterioration in mood or mental state, which may or may not be survived.

We are all reaching out to people we know that we think might need help. Many of us are volunteering, joining mutual aid societies, and doing far more for others than we usually might. This is all the more significant because it goes against the grain of the persistent neoliberal message – heightened by the pandemic – that other people can be reckoned with primarily as sources of risk and competition. The positivity around these good deeds is a welcome antidote to the constant tallies of infection and fatality, but with the best will in the world, it is not enough and it never will be. The UK government has a containment strategy, and an economic strategy. It needs a strategy for loneliness and mental health in the unique context of COVID-19, with research-led planning, engagement with multiple publics, serious funding for projects and services, and meaningful cut-through as quickly as can possibly be managed.

***

The loneliness caused or exacerbated by COVID-19 will outlast COVID-19. Although it seems dissonant to think about what comes after a crisis that is barely beginning, we know that loneliness is not just a response to external circumstances, apt to dissipate without harm when those circumstances change.

When Anna Lyndsey wrote of the ‘deformations of solitude’ in her 2015 memoir, Girl in the Dark, she gestured to a sense of being alone as a fundamentally transformative process. Loneliness is an experience by which people can be changed, with far-reaching consequences across the life course.

Habits of sociability and gregariousness can wither or be broken and new habits of avoidance and reticence spring up in their place; an earnest desire for withheld connection can shift into alienation and estrangement. When the emergency measures lift, many people will not feel able to re-enter their lives as if nothing had happened, as if they had never felt so alone. This fraught and difficult return needs to be planned and provided for.

Others will have no meaningful social lives to re-enter. Many will be bereaved, mired in a miserable mix of loneliness and grief. Many more will have been lonely before, with no expectation of things improving. If the society we had before COVID-19 is the model for what we attempt to reconstruct, then this watershed will have passed with its transformative potential spent.

Imagining post-COVID-19 futures requires a speculation about precisely what changes these intertwined crises could be catalysts for. The virus has certainly laid bare the fragility of many of our institutions and safety-nets, and underscored a series of damning ethical and political failures. Some protections which have been put in place are long overdue regardless of COVID-19. The hope is that they will be hard to withdraw later, and that COVID-19 will shine a light on other longstanding injustices and force a public and political confrontation of them, that this will somehow transform the societies that have lost so much. In this future, we continue to care for one another as fiercely as we will over the coming months. This is still a possibility, but it is one that must be tirelessly worked for.

Fred Cooper (@drfredcooper) is a Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter.

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