Exercises in Loneliness. Unfinished Essays

© Julia Shuvalova, 2017

ISBN 978-5-4474-0850-3

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Exercises in Loneliness

For my grandmother (1924—2014) and my mother

Preface

This is my first book. Like some of the first books, it’s taken a while to write. The genre of “unfinished essays” meant for quite a long time that I was writing occasional posts on my blog without a specific goal to turn them into a collection. Then it became obvious that it was possible to assemble them into a collection… and just about that time I gradually began to lose interest in the topic.

Regardless of circumstances, the essays are now ready to face the world. The book consists entirely of my essays and poems. In writing and then assembling the essays I went from irregular sketches on the topic of loneliness and solitude to a more concerted effort to share my views in the hope that someone may find them useful and benefit from my opinion or experience. Of course, this method can also be regarded as a means to combat loneliness. However, I genuinely believe there is something to benefit from in these texts. I’ve got a long way to go to reach the age and experience of Casanova, but on occasion of these essays I share the same attitude to letting others see into my inner world: my life is my subject, and my subject is my life.

Throughout the book you will find references to people whose work and thought has influenced, supported and developed me, so I won’t mention them here. And I don’t mention by name anyone who participated in creating the experiences that prompted me to write the essays. Some of them are physically gone, others I don’t want to name for a reason. Strictly speaking, although I couldn’t help drawing on some of my personal experiences, I never considered them as mine only. They were mine as far as my own circumstances were concerned, but they could be yours, too. The way I look at it, I describe some typical situations that one of my readers may have experienced.

I want to dedicate this book to my family. I published enough work for my grandma to see her prediction coming true, for I have become a writer. But I never managed to complete a book for her to know about it, at least. My mother will undoubtedly be proud. I owe her a bigger part of the home library and an undying support of my efforts and projects. Last but not least, I shall follow in the footsteps of those eccentric academics who thank their pets. I am very thankful to my pets for blissfully sleeping, while I was finishing the collection, and proving me right: loneliness subsides when you help and share your time and effort with those who need it. This is why, after some thinking, I added a short story, Felina Petrarcae, at the end of the book. It wasn’t composed as a complement to Exercises in Loneliness, but as it touches upon a similar subject, I thought it was a fitting addition.

Julia Shuvalova, Moscow, February 2015

Introduction

I am writing a series of essays, Exercises in Loneliness. The title came from out of the blue, but I like its ambiguity, or better put – the variety of interpretations that the title has in other languages. I think, in one way or another, I will be writing this series forever, yet now I must stop somewhere to make further reflection possible. So I stop here… to continue again one day.

The series has started on my blog, Los Cuadernos de Julia, with a small note about a film director whom I interviewed in 2005. He asked me what I was doing apart from journalism. “I write”, I told him. “I can’t be a writer”, he said, “it’s a very lonely experience”.

I remembered this well. Then there was a quote from Huysmans, that literature “is a way to save those who write it from the tedium of living”. There were a few phrases from L’Histoire de Ma Vie by Casanova, in which he admitted that he took to writing his memoirs in order to once again experience his incredible adventures. There was hardly another reason for an old librarian to do so, except loneliness exacerbated by stomach problems.

Then there was a post about Pascal Quignard that started, as a matter of fact, with my musings on the desire to read something inspiring and the obligation to write something as daunting as the history of Sikh martyrs!

Then there was a text composed over a two-hour dictation at Cornerhouse art centre in Manchester, soon to become extinct, probably. I contemplated the inevitability of loneliness as equivalent to being unique.

There were notes written on the train, a rather suitable draft from the year 2004, a text about female loneliness inspired by the works of V. Woolf, A. Schopenhauer and F. Nietzsche. Then an essay about a poem Café and Music. And little by little all other essays followed.

They are all united, first and foremost, by the fact that I wrote them alone, both literally and metaphorically, with no recourse to another’s opinion. This was rarely solitude or loneliness in a strict sense of the word: I was invariably surrounded by people who could distract me. They could be neighbours or the folk at the next table in a café. But there was no collaboration, and I never discussed these ideas with anyone, so you may say that loneliness has become a method. All essays were written differently: some on computer, the fourth essay was written entirely by hand, others have got some hand-written drafts, and all poems have got autographs. The fourth essay was written in two hours and marks not merely the flow of thinking but the passage of time, if you like. Interestingly, half of this introduction was written in Russian, as I considered making this collection bilingual but discarded the idea. Hence, what you have been reading up to now is a translated text. The remaining essays were written in English. It is a bit complicated with poems. Ever since my first fairytale that I composed at the age of six, I have been writing both poetry and prose. Poetic lines intercepted the fairytale, and here you will also find a few poems, some originally written in English, some translated into English by me that, apart from one or two exceptions, were composed at the time when I was writing the essays and therefore serve as the addenda.

I call these essays “exercises” because they have always been conceived as sketches. Making them a complete, detailed study of loneliness has never been intended. Today we live in the world where there is always someone near you: unless it is a guy at the next table, your pet or God (provided you are a believer), then it is almost certainly your virtual acquaintance who either communicates with you on Facebook or Twitter or reads the posts by you and others. This also means that loneliness is always fleeting, it comes and goes. Therefore, what is loneliness? When does it occur? When and why do we start feeling it? How do we experience it? When does it end? Does it end at all? My experience suggests that answers to all these questions are so personalized that it would be extremely audacious of me to try and offer any “complete” study of such condition. In addition, being a writer, the last thing I wanted was to turn this collection into a psychology book. Writing hardly needs to be any more psychologically underpinned than it naturally is.

As for me, I have no problem with loneliness, in general. I see loneliness as a rather normal type of human activity. It cannot be discarded as a state, but loneliness is in itself a by-product of some fundamental craving. However, there is a certain linguistic interest for me here, for the English language has at least three words that can all be translated into Russian as “loneliness”: solitude (being, or living alone, without any particularly negative connotation), loneliness per se (sometimes with a very negative connotation) and uniqueness (if we are to think of loneliness in some creative sense). That being said, uniqueness is a personal characteristic, while creativity is not necessary connected to artistic sphere. Still, loneliness is normally taken in social or strictly physical sense. We therefore talk about the necessity to communicate, the aim to belong to a society. Very few mention loneliness on occasions when you are surrounded by people you presume to be your near and dear, despite the fact that most of us have experienced this at least once in our lives, and dare I say it is this kind of loneliness that most of us find the least bearable. Nonetheless, most people I know find loneliness a terribly awful accident that occurs when there is not a soul around and as such should be avoided at all costs.

Meanwhile I am not sure about self-sufficiency that arises from solitary living, as it follows from Schopenhauer’s work. Perhaps, the reason for this is that there is not much true self-sufficiency around. My uncertainty is also due to the fact that every person needs a conversation with real people to arrive at unbiased conclusions. Writers need this all the more so. We need real people from past and present, with their jokes, hopes and weaknesses. There is no place for arrogance in literature as far as the knowledge of life is concerned. Every hyperbole conceals something very realistic, which usually presents itself in the society, that huge common room where women used to write in secret until Virginia Woolf announced that we needed money and a room of our own. As a woman, I entirely agree with her. However, since then many writers, both men and women, have acquired money and shut themselves in their own rooms, causing the style and subjects of their works to suffer dramatically. This is why I am not sure about Schopenhauer’s aloofness, as it leads some folk to think they can get by with their intuition and the little knowledge of life they’ve got. Indeed, we can imagine many things by going through the Panoptikum of our brain, but for that you need some examples of what things can be. Reading will not suffice, and in fact, a thoughtful, attentive reading is no less a lonely experience than writing.

The essays therefore are meant to give us food for thought, and what can be better food than the one that comes from a person who has been alone for the better part of their life? Being the only child does not necessarily predispose you to solitude or the perpetual feeling of loneliness, but as you live on and discover people, habits and modi operandi, you realize that solitude is salubrious, and loneliness is not the end of the world. In the end, as Joseph Brodsky put it in The Great Elegy for John Donne, if there are people and things that share our lives, what then shares our death and after-life? Is this not an indication that we are always – infinitely – alone? Is this not also a hint at the divine nature of a man because if the man is created after God’s own image, he has to be alone and to learn to live with his solitude and loneliness, as this is what God has been doing since the time before Time? This is not to say, “stop moaning! loneliness isn’t the worst thing that can happen”. Depending on circumstances and your predisposition, it can be the worst thing. But perhaps something in these essays will provide consolation, and each one being unfinished is a key to this. Loneliness, solitude, uniqueness are essentially permanent states; but, like tides, they can subside. All we need to do is to learn to live by the sea.

1

I remember speaking to one film director who complained that he had to write an article about his film. In his words, he’d be happy to talk about it as much as he could, but writing was weighing him down. As the person who, instead of a silver spoon, was probably born with a pen, I obviously asked what it was that he didn’t like about writing. His answer was that writing was “a lonely experience”.

Of course, as I’m writing this at an ungodly hour I have to admit that, physically, writing is the lonely experience. But mentally it can be quite stimulating and even scandalous, if one considers the works of Marquis de Sade, some of which he wrote in prison, and some – in a lunatic asylum.

Back in 2006 being alone felt exhilarating. I craved independence, and I had got my hands full. Not that I didn’t want to share work or success, but I was determined to succeed alone, first and foremost. Unconsciously, perhaps, I was drawing inspiration from the famous New York, New York song, paraphrasing it as “if I can make it on my own, I can make it with someone else”.

As I was to find out, we can all do things on our own but they often take awfully more time than if we did them in a company of like-minded people. Having gradually revisited my attitude to loneliness, I nonetheless kept my opinion of writing. It is not a lonely experience, for when I write I imagine the whole world that I inhabit both as an actor and a creator. My company is my characters, and even when I compose an academic essay or an article about a community leisure centre I am still surrounded by facts, figures and personalities. This is a thrilling experience, although I realise it may be more interesting, complex and fulfilling to operate a set of living people than the world that only exists in your head and maybe used to exist for real a good few centuries ago.

The longer you are alone, however, and the more you cherish your solitary state, the more you become insensitive to the outer world. Such scenario is not inevitable but loneliness becomes a habit, it blinds you, and it might take a bigger or lesser catastrophe to shake you out of this routine. You turn into Tony Camonte from Scarface, obsessed with power your solitude grants you and fully oblivious to the woes of others.