![]() The use of the term began to increase sharply after 1800 with the arrival of the Industrial Revolution, and continued to climb until the 1990s until it levelled off, rising again during the first decades of the 21st century. In the 19th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation. Totalitarianism found a way to crystallise occasional loneliness into a permanent state of being The first negative word spoken by God about his creation in the Bible comes in Genesis after he made Adam: ‘And the Lord God said, “It is not good that man is alone I shall make him a helpmate opposite him.”’ Descriptions of loneliness and abandonment were used to rouse the terror of nonexistence within men, to get them to imagine absolute isolation, cut off from the world and God’s love. Until the 19th century, loneliness referred to an action – crossing a threshold, or journeying to a place outside a city – and had less to do with feeling. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’) – much as Shakespeare used the term in the example from Hamlet above. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbours’. But well into the 17th century, the word was still rarely used. Throughout the 16th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave. Polonius beseeches Ophelia: ‘Read on this book, that show of such an exercise may colour your loneliness.’ (He is counselling her to read from a prayer book, so no one will be suspicious of her being alone – here the connotation is of not being with others rather than any feeling of wishing that she was.) One of the first uses was in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet, which was written around 1600. Everybody experiences loneliness, but they experience it differently.Īs a word, ‘loneliness’ is relatively new to the English language. Language fails to capture loneliness because loneliness is a universal term that applies to a particular experience. As soon as we begin to talk about loneliness, we transform one of the most deeply felt human experiences into an object of contemplation, and a subject of reason. ![]() And this is in part because loneliness is so difficult to communicate. One wallows in loneliness, while the other tries to do away with it altogether. Both approaches leave the reader a bit cold. Writing on loneliness often falls into one of two camps: the overindulgent memoir, or the rational medicalisation that treats loneliness as something to be cured. Everybody feels lonely from time to time. But, as Arendt knew, loneliness is a part of the human condition. Her father died of syphilis when she was seven she faked all manner of illnesses to avoid going to school as a child so she could stay at home her first husband left her in Berlin after the burning of the Reichstag she was stateless for nearly 20 years. ![]() ![]() From an early age, she had a keen sense that she was different, an outsider, a pariah, and often preferred to be on her own. I feel as if I have to go around looking for myself.’ The one oasis she found was in a dockworker-turned-philosopher from San Francisco, Eric Hoffer – but she wasn’t sure about him either: she told her friend Karl Jaspers that Hoffer was ‘the best thing this country has to offer’ she told her husband Heinrich Blücher that Hoffer was ‘very charming, but not bright’.Īrendt was no stranger to bouts of loneliness. She hated being on stage lecturing every day: ‘I simply can’t be exposed to the public five times a week – in other words, never get out of the public eye. She was told there would be 30 students in her undergraduate classes: there were 120, in each. Her colleagues lacked a sense of humour, and the cloud of McCarthyism hung over social life. She didn’t like the intellectual atmosphere. After the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, she was invited to be a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. ‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’. What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience … – From The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) by Hannah Arendt
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