At no time before have so many people lived alone, and never has loneliness been so widely or keenly felt. Why, in a society of individualists, is living alone perceived as a shameful failure? And can we ever be happy on our own?
Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives – can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book, Alone explores how we want to live.
Drawing on personal experience, as well as philosophy and sociology, Daniel Schreiber explores the tension between the desire for solitude and freedom, and for companionship, intimacy and love. Along the way he illuminates the role that friendships play in our lives – can they be a response to the loss of meaning in a world in crisis? A profoundly enlightening book, Alone explores how we want to live.
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Reviews
Beautifully written and elegantly constructed, Alone explores the tension between our desire for the freedom of solitude, and the draw of companionship, and questions how we might disentangle ourselves from inherited ideas about how to live. Romantic love is this relentless grand narrative in our culture but it's only one way of living - what about the grand narrative of friendship? I absolutely loved reading it.
The most moving, memorable books are the ones that attempt to answer questions that the author has been struggling with for his entire life. In Alone, Daniel Schreiber - a beautiful writer and, just as important, a beautiful thinker - explores the questions of not just his life, but our age: Who am I if no one loves me? What are the limits of friendship? How does one live with deep and profound loneliness? This is a book for not just this year, but this era
Oh my god, I tore through this breathtaking book! Alone is gorgeously, sensitively written and yet so explicit in its honesty and vulnerability. I connected with it deeply and personally - I truly loved it.
Daniel Schreiber has written a brave and searching vindication of single life, a book about the cultivation and tending of solitude, about solitude as an art. Amid the bewildering loss of everydayness imposed by the pandemic, when solitude was not chosen but enforced, Schreiber creates in these pages a moving conversation - with philosophers and poets, theorists and novelists - about the sources of value in our lives. By multiplying our sense of those sources, by insisting on the dignity of models of life that have sometimes been disparaged, this book finally becomes a document of liberation
An intelligent, moving, and heartfelt meditation on the mixed joys and sorrows of solitude. Schreiber's prose is gorgeous, practically silken, and he wears his erudition so lightly that he is the best possible guide on this journey to the elegant lunar landscape of aloneness.
This is a book to love and to cherish. Daniel Schreiber is such a skilled and engaging writer. Without sentimentality, he digs into the taboo subject of loneliness - societal, personal, existential; the salvation of hiking, the many dimensions of friendship, the solace of literature, the value of kindness, the pleasures of solitude. You will meet Nietzsche, Sappho, Arendt - and perhaps you will meet yourself, walking in the hills, thinking about new ways to live.
Schreiber's arguments and personal reflections beautifully capture our emotional lives; they manage to be both honest and inspiring
A heartfelt memoir on being single, living alone and the existential experience of loneliness . . . a study of intimacy and independence . . . Alone is also a very personal narrative, one that covers friendship, sexuality, depression and ageing. Schreiber's observations are heartfelt, particularly the ideas that even the most acute loneliness can bring us something
Romantic love, suggests the author of this engaging extended essay, is the lone "grand narrative" to have survived seismic societal shifts in modern times . . . He fuses memoir with intellectual flair, quoting from philosophers and psychoanalysts as he considers the lot of a larger than ever group of people. Hermits and intimacy, the taboo of loneliness and the consolation of friendship - all find their place in a meditation that nods to joy and adversity
Blends passages of memoir with scholarly and literary references to explore the author's existence as a single gay man who often feels he is living outside standard social models . . . Friendship is, in fact, as much the topic of this book as aloneness. Schreiber writes interestingly about it, drawing a contrast between its polymorphic freedoms and the 'grand narratives' of love and family . . . Alone follows a "small" spirit itself; it takes only brief dips into its sources, and does not drive towards any climactic answer . . . Beautiful images and insights bounce up along the way.
Schreiber eloquently digs in to the taboo subjects of loneliness and shame. It has to be said that Alone is not a self-help book; it's an existential book, and all the more transgressive for it. A hybrid between essay and memoir, the author puts to work the writing of various philosophers and poets, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sappho to examine the vicissitudes of intimacy, solitude, the solace of friendships. Schreiber is interested in the gap between the life we live and the life that we imagined for ourselves. In this sense, Alone is also a conversation about yearning for an unlived life
The challenges and contours of a life spent largely alone is the subject of Schreiber's reflective, elegantly written book - a bestseller in Germany and recently translated into English. In eight essays, blending personal narrative and psychology, Schreiber explores contemporary solitude . . . Schreiber writes perceptively of the pain of being "left behind" in love, and of the cumulative effect of routine loneliness and its insidious, stultifying impact on well-being and broader world view. His descriptions of mixed, murky feelings are evocative, moving and often instantly familiar . . . Schreiber applies psychology and sociology carefully, never rushing to flimsy conclusions or reaching for false connections . . . Schreiber's well-read self-reflection elevates Alone. With this thought-provoking, often profound book, he proffers a hand to anyone who may have felt irrevocably, irredeemably alone and says "me, too"
A staggeringly beautiful meditation . . . Alone is a monograph whose resonance will only increase with time . . . Schreiber's melancholy genius, reminiscent of Thomas Mann, is evident on every page. The delicacy of his insights, his quiet dedication to consciousness, and the calibre of his reflections mark him as a writer to treasure
I'm not surprised that the German essayist and biographer's poignant and personal exploration of this taboo subject spent nearly a year on Germany's best-seller list in 2021 . . . Although divided into chapters on different aspects of loneliness . . . the book's 152 pages read as one long essay on being alone . . . Along the way we are treated to snippets from sociologists, psychologists and writers . . . Schreiber writes movingly about our expectations of what counts as a good life.
One of our country's finest essayists, because he always manages to address exemplary topics of our time through his own biography