On yearning – Charles Foster in TLS:

‘We hear often about an “epidemic” of loneliness. It is not hard to see why. A recent survey for the Office of National Statistics found that 49 per cent of adults in the UK are lonely always, often, some of the time or occasionally. Loneliness is more of a problem in young people. Nearly half of US adults report experiencing loneliness daily.
This epidemic brings other problems in its wake, including anxiety, depression, stroke and heart disease. These are certainly pathologies, but I’m tempted to say that loneliness itself is not pathological. Far from it; it is the normal human condition. It’s the half of westerners who don’t report loneliness who are the strange ones.’ (…)
‘Daniel Schreiber’s Alone, immaculately translated from the German by Ben Fergusson, is an examination and celebration of friendship, marred by his need to denigrate more intimate relationships. He is a gay man, living alone. Why alone? His candour is alarming. He tells us that an exclusive romantic relationship would be too psychologically arduous, that he lacks the “fundamental optimism” (about anything) that such a relationship would demand, and that the toll taken by previous relationships has left him exhausted, in a kind of PTSD. More than that, “the world of gay love and desire was characterised by a mercilessness that, after a certain age, made you invisible”. He is invisible now to potential romantic partners.’

(…)

‘This is powerful and moving testimony, supported by a survey of the role of friendship in eudaimonia in Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch and, particularly, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. In The Politics of Friendship(1994), Derrida wrote “I renounce you; I have decided to do so” – an utterance that, for Schreiber, is “the most beautiful and the most inevitable … declaration of love”, for it acknowledges and sanctifies the other, excises the cancer of possession and control, and permits freedom. Levinas erected an entire philosophy on a similar foundation. We can neither recognize nor understand the other, nor be recognized nor understood, say Levinas and Derrida: live with it. Being unknowable is inevitable and the root of a melancholic dignity. It is also the root of our inevitable loneliness – if we have the insight to be lonely.’

(…)

‘Loneliness is, or involves a sort of psychological hypersensitivity that makes us “more vulnerable to rejection, increases our insecurity in social situations and makes us see danger even when there is none”. He tantalizes by raising issues only to drop them, half discussed. Loneliness meant that he was no longer himself, he says – though without going on to draw the conclusion that we are creatures of our relationship.’

(…)

‘To ease his loneliness Schreiber takes up knitting in front of the television, and muses: “You don’t just make a garment, you make meaning … You take your loneliness and make something beautiful out of it”.’

(…)

‘The need to be known – to be co-authored, even by a dull, inarticulate co-author – makes her flirt with dating apps, but she doesn’t like the sound of herself in the ad. “A Black woman”, she says; “Older. Larger. Taller”; “Maybe, if I’m lucky, I can become some sort of fetish or a quick roll around in the darkness”. She’s not fussy. “I never wanted an extraordinary love. I just wanted it to be real.”’

(…)
‘Following Freud, but riffing creatively on his themes, Melanie Klein concluded that loneliness – which characterized her life, and which she saw in everyone – begins when, as infants, we first see that we are separate from our mothers. This becomes generalized into an awareness of our separation from all other beings. Paul Tillich put it well: “Being alive means being in a body – a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone”. Well, yes. But (it’s a constant theme in these three books), aloneness is not loneliness. Loneliness consists in the frustrated yearning to connect with others – the yearning described in Plato’s Symposium when Aristophanes asserts that we were four-limbed and two-headed before the angry gods split us in two, condemning us to search for our lost other half. “There remains”, Klein wrote in her last great essay, “an unsatisfied longing for an understanding without words – ultimately for the earliest relation with the mother. The longing contributes to the sense of loneliness and derives from the depressive feeling of an irretrievable loss.”’

(…)

‘Klein, Tillich and Plato are right: loneliness is part of the human condition. But that is no reason to accept it. We must not. It can be mitigated by kindness – to oneself and to others.’

Read the article here.

Loneliness and aloneness are two different things indeed.

The separation from the mother be traumatic, but that word is suffering from inflation and the tendency to dramatize your own life can also mean: dramatizing your own loneliness.

‘I never wanted an extraordinary love. I just wanted it to be real.’ The question is what’s real? Relationships and especially romantic love is, as we all know, also a market. Some are more desirable than others. Age can play a role, social skills et cetera.

But the need to be 'co-authored by others' survives sometimes better than our bodies.

Accepting the fact that we are unknowable and the melancholy that comes with it is and will be part of life.

After the accepting we can do some knitting in front of the television. Or other sorts of knitting. Knitting is an apt metaphor for strategies to fight loneliness temporarily.