A biography of loneliness
A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion
June 6, 2020
All the lonely people, where do they all come from?
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
The Beatles song 'Eleanor Rigby' was perhaps one of the first time popular culture in Britain drew attention to the rising loneliness as a modern affliction. More recently, Olivia Laing addressed the issue in her 2016 book, The Lonely City. As yet another British exploration of this theme, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion is a markedly different book even as it draws on the ideas articulated in both of the aforementioned predecessors. Published following the UK's appointment of a 'Minister of Loneliness' in 2018, Fay Bound Alberti's book is a response to the idea of loneliness as an 'epidemic' and is therefore more of a socio-historical study of loneliness as a condition rather than an exploration of its emotional or lived experience.
With some brief segues into the emotional standing and understanding of loneliness in the western world, A Biography of Loneliness focuses on loneliness as a historical development in the longue durée and its affects on our notions and treatment of the elderly, of romantic love, of home, of materiality and of social media. The arguments regarding cause and effect are mostly meritorious — loneliness is approached as a cluster of emotions, a state affecting both mind and body, a product of vulnerabilities of gender, class and culture that are resultant of capitalist modernity and more recently, of neoliberalism. However, when it comes to looking at loneliness through a cultural and experiential lens, this book is less than illuminating with its seemingly half-hearted forays into the lives of Sylvia Plath and Queen Victoria, and into select literature and poetry.
More importantly, while Bound Alberti rightly highlights the paradoxical state of isolation that social media creates and feeds, her argument is limited mostly to Facebook and ends on a reductive and ambivalent note of positivity, stating that there are more studies that show its benefits rather than its disadvantages. Of course there are — if social media can influence major elections around the world, it stands that they can fund a lot of positive studies. The issue with this argument is that while it acknowledges the existence of a problem and articulates the vague shape of it, it fails to fully convey what the problem is (something achieved to a considerable extent elsewhere in the book), which is not the way or the amount in which social media is used, but the way it is designed to create distinct worlds instead of reflecting the real one.
Overall, A Biography of Loneliness does well as a survey of loneliness towards socio-political end by bringing up grounds for policy change, and it's worth a read for that much alone. But in terms of the writing style (dry with occassional showers) and emotive understanding, this history of an emotion is somewhat underwhelming(ly academic).
All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
The Beatles song 'Eleanor Rigby' was perhaps one of the first time popular culture in Britain drew attention to the rising loneliness as a modern affliction. More recently, Olivia Laing addressed the issue in her 2016 book, The Lonely City. As yet another British exploration of this theme, A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion is a markedly different book even as it draws on the ideas articulated in both of the aforementioned predecessors. Published following the UK's appointment of a 'Minister of Loneliness' in 2018, Fay Bound Alberti's book is a response to the idea of loneliness as an 'epidemic' and is therefore more of a socio-historical study of loneliness as a condition rather than an exploration of its emotional or lived experience.
With some brief segues into the emotional standing and understanding of loneliness in the western world, A Biography of Loneliness focuses on loneliness as a historical development in the longue durée and its affects on our notions and treatment of the elderly, of romantic love, of home, of materiality and of social media. The arguments regarding cause and effect are mostly meritorious — loneliness is approached as a cluster of emotions, a state affecting both mind and body, a product of vulnerabilities of gender, class and culture that are resultant of capitalist modernity and more recently, of neoliberalism. However, when it comes to looking at loneliness through a cultural and experiential lens, this book is less than illuminating with its seemingly half-hearted forays into the lives of Sylvia Plath and Queen Victoria, and into select literature and poetry.
More importantly, while Bound Alberti rightly highlights the paradoxical state of isolation that social media creates and feeds, her argument is limited mostly to Facebook and ends on a reductive and ambivalent note of positivity, stating that there are more studies that show its benefits rather than its disadvantages. Of course there are — if social media can influence major elections around the world, it stands that they can fund a lot of positive studies. The issue with this argument is that while it acknowledges the existence of a problem and articulates the vague shape of it, it fails to fully convey what the problem is (something achieved to a considerable extent elsewhere in the book), which is not the way or the amount in which social media is used, but the way it is designed to create distinct worlds instead of reflecting the real one.
Overall, A Biography of Loneliness does well as a survey of loneliness towards socio-political end by bringing up grounds for policy change, and it's worth a read for that much alone. But in terms of the writing style (dry with occassional showers) and emotive understanding, this history of an emotion is somewhat underwhelming(ly academic).