Loneliness Is Other People

We’re away until January 4, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2020. Enjoy your holiday!

I’d never met Ian in person; we matched on a dating app in January, one week before he flew to China to start teaching cultural studies at a university in Hong Kong. We continued to message, and it was Ian who, on Valentine’s Day, first introduced me to the term social distancing. His school had recently moved to online learning, around the time that shops and restaurants began to shutter, and he was lonely; he described life in Hong Kong as a kind of super future, one in which the social fabric had broken down and citizens were living on a fault line. He lamented the impossibility of making new friends or dating in what he called the old analog style; he sent me an article from the South China Morning Post about the way we wither without touch. He appeared relatively cheerful, though, and he had come to embrace the life of an ascetic, running twenty kilometers a day through the verdant hills of Hong Kong and mastering his split-legged arm balance with the help of Fiji McAlpine, his virtual yoga instructor.

Back then the virus had seemed, to me at least, a threat unique to China. Social distancing would make a good novel title, I joked, never imagining that Americans would be doing the same in a matter of weeks, that the phrase would soon be joining so many others—community spread, an abundance of caution, flattening the curve. But then the book event for which I had driven to my mother’s Rhode Island summerhouse was canceled, and with it much of life in New York City, and while I was used to, even thrived on, long solitary stretches—the previous winter I had opted to seclude myself for sixty days, leading an existence that was almost indistinguishable from my existence now—the growing realization that this time around I had no choice gave rise to a powerful, panicky loneliness. Coronavirus and the isolation it imposed, coupled with uncertainty about the future, about how long such radical withdrawal would last, was the clearest distillation yet that, some four and a half years after my divorce, I was still utterly alone.

Comments

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...

The Historical Future of Trans Literature

Whatever happens against custom we say is against Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her. May Nature’s universal reason chase away that deluded ecstatic amazement which novelty brings to us. —Michel de Montaigne If you were trying to get anywhere in the late thirteenth century, the Hereford Mappa Mundi would not have been particularly helpful; the map is rife with topographical omissions, compressions, and errors—the most egregious of which is perhaps the mislabeling of Africa as Europe and vice-versa. Of course, as any medievalist will tell you, mappa mundi were not intended for cartographic accuracy anyway. Rather, they were pictorial histories, encyclopedias of the world’s mythological and theological narratives, records of medical fact and fable. Notable places—Carthage, Rome, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Jericho—appeared, but their placement on the map emphasized their symbolic import, rather than their geographical specificity. Thus, ...

Re-Covered: Living Through History

A woman sips a cup of tea after her street is struck by a German bombing raid, 1940 Since the beginning of lockdown, I’ve sought refuge in sagas set during the Second World War. There is something deeply comforting about reading stories in which people are trying to live their lives against the backdrop of an intense global crisis, not least because it’s given me a much-needed sense of perspective. It’s so easy to become caught up in the myriad horrors of the contemporary moment, one sometimes forgets that the darkest days of the Second World War would have been just as depressing and desperate as the period we’re living through right now. Of the many books on the subject I read, Blitz Spirit: Voices of Britain Living Through Crisis, 1939–1945 —a brilliant new compendium of extracts from wartime diaries compiled from the Mass Observation Archive by the anthologist, editor, and literary agent Becky Brown—has stuck with me. Mass Observation (MO) was set up in 1937 by the anthr...

TOBI'S DESK

Search This Blog