Subtitles section Play video
-
When we think of what might have been lost on the way to becoming modern, we're liable
-
to think about mealtimes: how seldom they now take place communally, how rare it is
-
for whole families to gather, how much technology can intrude. In paintings of communal meals
-
that reflect the older way of doing things, we can appreciate how all ages used to come
-
together around a table and how welcoming the atmosphere seems to have been. Even the
-
family horse might have been invited to join in.
-
The modern condition appears so bleak by comparison. Rather than a family around the hearth, the
-
emblematic image is of a single person with a tray on their trees in front of the television.
-
It was the Swanson Corporation, originally a poultry producer in Omaha, Nebraska, that
-
launched the frozen TV dinner in 1954, the same year colour television was introduced
-
in the United States. It is a short distance in time, but a long way in spirit, from Norman
-
Rockwell's laughter-filled family Thanksgiving celebration to Swanson's industrially produced
-
turkey meal for one ('Just heat and serve').
-
Modernity is surely a lonelier place than the world that preceded it. The question is
-
why. It isn't ultimately technology (cities, cars or screens) that have made us lonely;
-
it's an identifiable set of ideas. We have rendered ourselves lonely first and foremost
-
because of certain stories we have started to tell about what loneliness means.
-
Most eras before our own knew that solitude did not - per se - have to be a sign of wretchedness
-
or deficiency. In the fourth century, the greatest saint of early Christianity, Saint
-
Anthony, was said to have spent more than forty years by himself in Egypt's Western
-
desert, not saying a word, eating only bread and salt, communing with God. So impressed
-
were some with St Anthony's life, they came to join him in the desert,
-
and became collectively known as the Desert Fathers, and their philosophy of solitary
-
piety would go on to have a decisive influence on the founding of monasteries. At the height
-
of monasticism in the Middle Ages, a million people across Europe and north Africa had
-
chosen to forego the bustle of family and commerce in order to dwell, in some of the
-
most rugged and remote terrain in the world, in silent contemplation of God
-
However, in the wake of the Reformation and the destruction of the monasteries that accompanied
-
it, solitary piety began to lose its prestige and recede as a practical option. Those who
-
had previously lived alone at the tops of mountains were now encouraged to serve God
-
by remaining in the community, finding a suitable spouse - and starting a family.
-
To this newly social religious impetus was added the influence of Romanticism, a movement
-
of ideas that - with different ends in view - similarly encouraged people to give up on
-
thorough commitments to their own company and questioned the honour of solitude. For
-
the Romantics, happiness lay in identifying one exceptional soulmate to whom one could
-
surrender one's independence and with whom one might fuse mind and body.
-
In the process, the Romantic movement turned solitude from a respectable choice, to evidence
-
of pathology.
-
When the Beatles released Eleanor Rigby in 1966, the song that more than any other defined
-
what loneliness meant for the modern age, it was at once clear why Eleanor was a lamentable
-
figure. The famous face that she kept in a jar by the door had been intended for the
-
enchanting partner that, like all single people, she must have longed to find. Only with romantic
-
love could there be a decent life, so ran the philosophy of the song, of all the Beatles'
-
works and in fact, of every modern pop song every written. Fail to fall completely in
-
love and, Romanticism warned, one would soon enough be picking up rice in the church where
-
a wedding had been - or rivalling for strangeness the comparably odd Father Mackenzie, around
-
whom there seemed so little of the glamour that had once attended the Desert Fathers.
-
The modern world not only made it mandatory to have a partner. It made it feel essential
-
to have a vibrant gang of friends - and to enjoy seeing them regularly at parties. An
-
empty diary became an emblem of deformity.
-
But there was not
-
the slightest admission that it might, all things considered, be a distinctly curious
-
thing to stand in a crowded room full of status-panicked, socially-anxious people, every one of them
-
terrified of honesty or failure.
-
In 1921, Carl Jung - in his book Psychological Types - introduced the terms 'extraverted'
-
and 'introverted' to divide humanity. The former referred to a sort of person who
-
could best realise their potential in the company of others; the latter were those who
-
needed to move away from crowds and idle chatter in order to regain their integrity. 'Everyone
-
possesses both mechanisms,' wrote Jung - but it was evident where the spirit of the age
-
resided.
-
It's been the achievement of a few, often at the time ignored artists of the modern
-
period to make a case for introversion, to try to coat solitude in glamour. In a painting
-
by Caspar David Friedrich, we are invited to trust that the lonely figure in the landscape
-
is privy to insights that would be lost in the crowd down in the lowlands, he has needed
-
to travel up to the mountains in order to put the bluster and envy of humans into perspective;
-
We should dare to follow him in his trajectory.
-
Separated by many decades, Gwen John's young woman doesn't seem to belong to any official
-
religion. But if there were one dedicated to the appreciation of solitude, she would
-
be one of its saintly and legendary figures. Her expression - kind, gentle, melancholy
-
and lost in profundity - is an advertisement for all that modernity has neglected in its
-
promotion of active, cheery lives.
-
Isolation isn't a particular malediction; it's where good people tend to end up.
-
We should dare to believe that we are in solitude not because we are ill but because we are
-
noble of spirit. We don't hate company; it's just that we would prefer to stay home
-
rather than accept the counterfeit tokens of community presently on offer.
-
The way to make people feel less alone isn't to pull them out of their musings in the forest
-
or in the diner, in the library or the desert - and force them to go bowling. It's to
-
reassure them that being alone is no sign of failure. To lessen modernity's crisis
-
of loneliness, we need for solitude to be rehabilitated and for singlehood to regain
-
its dignity. There is nothing catastrophic about eating dinner, many dinners, on our
-
own. The Swanson TV dinners might have been capable of improvement, but it is ultimately
-
far better to be eating a basic meal in peace than to be in a ballroom surrounded by false
-
smiles and oppressive judgements. When we do so, we aren't in fact on our own at all.
-
We are - as modernity has failed to remind us - dining with some of the finest, most
-
elevated spirits who have ever lived. We are, though ostensibly by ourselves, in the very
-
best company.
-
One of the trickiest tasks we ever have to face is that of working out who we really are.
-
This book is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves with the help of some unusual, oblique, entertaining, and playful prompts. Click the link on screen now to find out more.