Loneliness
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi. Theory. Welcome to Hi Theory. In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Kim Adams. And I'm Sharanik Bhushu. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. Hello and welcome to Hi Theory. Today we are talking to Laura Maris about loneliness.

Before we enter our conversation, can I ask Laura, would you mind introducing yourself? Of course. My name is Laura Maris. I'm a writer and translator and the author of The Age of Loneliness, which is a collection of essays thinking about loneliness, both personally and ecologically, which came out from Graywolf in August 2024. Congratulations on the book. So let me ask you my first question, which is, what the heck is loneliness? Yeah.

So from my perspective, loneliness and specifically ecological loneliness, which is kind of the lens that I've been using to think about it,

is the way that people, when they design places, you know, by, for, and of themselves, really kind of deprive themselves of the abundance of other human and more than human communities. Loneliness is what results when a person is kind of cut off from their relationship to the living world. And ecological loneliness is also reciprocal. I think you kind of have to understand it reciprocally, so...

You know, if we are diminishing the presence of other species, then we're both making ourselves lonely in that space of diminishment, as well as kind of harming that other species. So there's this kind of way that there's no change that loneliness creates that does not somehow come back to the originator of that feeling. Yeah.

So loneliness has been at the center of, let's say, popular conversations about, you know, around self-help, around things like loneliness. The conversation of loneliness, of course, at least in popular culture, is also heavily gendered. So, you know, the loneliness of men, the loneliness of women, different contexts, different social circumstances. Which is to say that there are shorthands to think about loneliness that are very popular today.

which can, I guess, render it opaque in some ways. So do you feel like planetary ecological stakes of loneliness that you're talking about can be kind of connected to how we are socially trained to think about loneliness that is...

very atomistic and individual. Absolutely. I think there's a couple of ways to do that. First of all, just the most basic way. There have been a lot of scientific studies in recent years that have had this idea that people are actually a lot less lonely when they're around birds, trees, water, etc.

that these kind of green spaces do have a very direct effect on the loneliness of public space or how people feel when they move through neighborhoods. That was kind of what interested me. It was less this big pop cultural sense of loneliness and more the ways that loneliness could maybe be like ground truth in a way as people move through local places that they know.

And also the sense kind of globally that I think relates to all of these ways that loneliness is gendered or loneliness is thought of as a kind of bucket for everything that's sort of wrong with individual unconscious. I think, yeah, the way that loneliness can...

to living in a society that's so focused on growth, on capital. You know, if you have everything that you need, you don't have to ask anyone for it. You know, you don't have to be in community with anyone or anything. Yeah.

And so there's that kind of sense of loneliness as the shadow side. For me, the technological side is less interesting because it just seems like another kind of side effect of this idea of escape, of...

from what's happening outside or alienation from ways of being able to read a landscape and to read a place and to think about the kind of vertical history of that place, everything that sort of happened on your block over the last hundred years.

If you peel back that layer, it becomes fascinating to think about that place again and the ways that it's changed and the ways that, you know, maybe it has become more lonely in the course of your generation or your lifetime or the ways that people are trying to change the spaces around them to be more hospitable to other living beings.

There's this term, you know, that it's where my book gets its title, which is the idea of the aremacene, which means the age of loneliness. It's one of these kind of alternative names for our era.

for the Anthropocene or the Cthulhu scene or the Capitalocene, you know, these terms. And I was fascinated by the term the age of loneliness because it refers to kind of human presence as like a last, a species that has outlasted a lot of other life on this planet. And of course that relates to questions of climate change and biodiversity loss. But that term was always supposed to be a warning, right?

It wasn't supposed to be a given. And so when I set out to write these essays, I was really trying to think about, um,

how's the pop cultural way of thinking about loneliness sort of made me think that this era already exists and we're already in it and what ways could I kind of push back against that to think about histories that are both human and more than human in these local places that I know that might be sort of unseen or overlooked or maybe erased by what's been subsequently built there all these ways that

you know, being, being disconnected from environmental history is also, I think, part of loneliness. Um, and that like, if you don't really know what's happened in the place where you live, then, then your own presence there is, is a kind of isolated story. Yeah.

When I ask you, how do we use loneliness? Can I, you know, can you talk a little bit about your method in, you know, writing this book, how the essays came about? And also, you know, and I just, I don't want to keep

Thinking about different species of loneliness. But I also think that, you know, you as an author, there is also a certain kind of loneliness that comes to being a public intellectual and, you know, talking into spaces that not necessarily hear you as, you know, as you want, especially in political climates that we are living.

right now familiar with. So anyway, that's all a lot of kind of caveats, but how do we use loneliness? I'll answer that in a couple of different ways. First of all, I think

The essay form is a form that can bring people into conversation who would never otherwise talk to each other. And for me, the essay form is so valuable because you can kind of create these conversations on the page. You can facilitate them as an essayist. And then also you can leave space on the page as an essayist for the reader to kind of think along with you, for a reader to have a kind of sense of not being told how to think, but that

having this intellectual process alongside you. That's kind of one aspect of how the form of this book took shape. And as I started to work on the book, I realized that loneliness could potentially be a helpful feeling in these times. I know that might sound strange, but I started thinking a lot about grief versus loneliness.

We hear a lot of these kind of conversations about like eco grief and eco anxiety, which are really valid feelings. They especially, you know, eco grief, it has such a relationship to finality. Grief is like something irreparable. And there are a lot of irreparable things happening.

But there's also this way that like when grief persists for a long time, it can be kind of transmuted into loneliness and loneliness can be something that's kind of like, you know, as I say in the book, it sort of like hums in the background and

there's a way that if you, if you begin to listen to loneliness, it kind of shows you what's missing. It, it helps, at least it helped me to understand the way that I had had these kind of emotional connections and relationships to the natural world before in my life. And it helped me kind of get a roadmap for how I could recreate them. Well, you brought up the idea of ground truthing. Ground truth is this really, to me, like a really wonderful concept because it's,

What it literally means is there are these fields that kind of like depend on remote sensing, like for example, like radar for a weather report. And yet ground truth is like the people who are in a place who are looking up at the sky, who are telling you if it's really raining or not.

if it's really storming or not. When I set out to do with these essays was I really wanted to try to kind of ground truth, loneliness in the places that I had come across, you know, in my life, places that were familiar to me, places that I knew and, and, you know, thought I knew pretty well. And yet I was kind of looking for,

of how things had kind of gone missing, how things had slipped out of view in these places that even I hadn't known about. And so loneliness became this kind of way of like,

What a figuring out what had happened in places that I knew well at a time when there are a lot of shifting baselines. And one example of that in the book is horseshoe crabs on the beaches where near where I grew up near Long Island Sound.

And when I was a kid, I would see a lot of them come up on the beaches during the summer full moons. And but then as I get older, I realized I was seeing fewer and fewer of them. And then I realized that the reason that they've been diminishing in Long Island Sound is actually tied to this whole complicated story of the way that their blood is harvested for medical testing, right?

They have this kind of ancient immune system. So, you know, thinking about just like the most recent pandemic and how horseshoe crab blood was used to make sure that COVID vaccines were safe. Like all of a sudden the fact that you're not seeing as many horseshoe crabs because they're being harvested. And the fact that this has been happening in my case, like in these childhood beaches that, yeah,

I've known for a long time, but I had never known how deeply they were connected to this blood harvest that's been going up on all up and down the East Coast.

So these kind of stories that are easy to overlook are often the things that are most deeply tied to huge systems of power and of human relationship to other species that are occurring over much larger spans of space and time than you might originally think just walking around your neighborhood. And that's just to say that I

I think, how do we use loneliness? We use loneliness, ideally, to be something that helps us

value and create better archives of ecological memory. Um, something that helps us value like community science data, you know, the people who do the unglamorous work of going out and counting horseshoe crabs or counting birds or looking for endangered plants, like these people who do really good work, um, caring for local ecosystems, um, over sometimes over decades, over years, um,

The winter bird count has been going on for a century, over a century. These archives, as things change faster and faster, become more and more important. So if there's something that you're missing in a local place, chances are you're not alone in that. Chances are that maybe other people have noticed and maybe other people are out there counting it and trying to kind of figure out how that population is changing over time. How will loneliness save the world?

This is a tough question. So, you know, I agree with you that it's much easier, it can feel much easier to destroy something than to preserve it. And I think...

Preservation is tricky because it's related to ideas of control, of human hubris. All these things that we know are kind of part of our relationship to loneliness and even going back in time, right? The kind of toxic idea of species loneliness, where humans are sort of at the top of the pyramid of consciousness, right?

And we know species loneliness, that old idea is like falling apart in so many ways. We know, we understand loneliness as like a negative destructive force too. Most people can agree that they don't want to be lonely. Yeah.

And so I think, but I think if you actually like spend time with that feeling rather than pushing it away, loneliness can be this kind of shadow work for understanding how a society, you know, based around capital, based around growth can create profound isolation. Yeah.

if you can transmute loneliness into understanding or into longing or into rebuilding, you know, if you can use your loneliness as a roadmap for what you're missing, um, I do think that that can be a helpful, potentially, um, really powerful restorative work. Um,

I think one example of that is from the book is the idea of containment areas. When I first moved to Western New York, I became really fascinated with these sites that are often sort of, you know, they're unassuming. You see, you know, driving around empty lots that

Sometimes are ringed and chain link fences, sometimes are not. They're often really overgrown or, you know, they've just been like neatly mowed, but there's nothing else there. And these are basically sites that are often, they're former sites of industrial pollution, toxicity. Some of them are brownfields. They're sites that have, they're not zoned anymore for any kind of human use.

So they're basically places that have been humans have sort of forced to abandon and they're markers of post-industrial toxicity, the ways that people have failed to care for places, the ways that people have polluted places, all these things are true.

But they're also in their status as discarded places. There are places that have been set free from any kind of real estate use, from any kind of...

to make a profit for anyone. These are very hopeful sites to me. And they're sites that help me understand that aftermath and abandonment and spites that to humans seem very lonely are also possibly the start of a more than human place.

you know, the fantasy of not being somewhere and that place kind of regenerating itself. It's a really powerful fantasy. It's not nihilistic at all. It's just like... It's more that the place is a place that like...

suddenly becomes democratic because humans are no longer trying to control it. It's that other things come back and have equal interference within it. And I think there's, you know, in the meme, like nature is healing, right? There's this total binary between

human presence and the presence of other things which are perceived as like you know innocent I think there's like this innocence to the natural world and its capacity to heal I think the real sophistication and intelligence of the natural world is not that it heals but it's actually like the

There's this sudden leveling of the playing field where things are allowed to come back and consume spaces where they were once eradicated. They're allowed to live freely in these places. And so it's in some ways allowing healthier networks of predation, competition for resources, all these things that are not purely human. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you so much, Laura, for coming to High Theory and talking to us. And congratulations again on The Age of Loneliness. We can't wait to read your book. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for listening to High Theory. If you like our podcast, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcast fix. Owen Quinn composes our theme music. Sharonic Bosu and Kim Adams edit our audio. And Sharonic Bosu manages our social media.

You can find High Theory on the NewBooks Network and also on hightheory.net. We hope you have a highly theoretical day.