Solos on Loneliness
Radio 4
To a programme on loneliness (9 April, 11am), currently being pushed as a “modern condition” – families scattered, too long spent on computers with virtual friends. Yet this half-hour seemed instead to stretch down the decades to any time, any place, so long as there was a clock on the wall and a stove to boil water. These sounds turned up repeatedly. A timepiece ticked as someone spoke about being “embarrassed” by a life reduced to “hellos and goodbyes”. Water boiled loudly as another insisted “you just have to draw strength from being self-contained” (were we to imagine the cooking of a solitary egg?). The sound effects worked.
Anyone who has ever lived alone – I did for ten years – knows that time can both harden and soften a hundred times over the course of a day, and that the most innocuous of noises becomes distorted, giving you a strange, beckoning jolt, sometimes a whole new brain-rhythm. The programme was sensitive to sound in general and to the music of the human voice. One woman, a widow, recalled the times she would wake up with her husband and say, “What shall we do today?” Her inflection altered with the terrible happiness of the memory. A man who had lost family in a bitter divorce spoke about “falling down” a lot (“I need to talk to someone otherwise I will fall down”) and his tone flattened every time he said it, as though physically sinking back.
If the programme seemed at first to baby the issue – the psychosomatic peculiarities of being human reduced to the plain, quiet need for company – when the broadcaster Andy Kershaw talked about his overwhelming loneliness, he brought an enabling anger with him, challenging the world to bring him a more gadding, sybaritic existence (or return him the one that he lost). His loneliness didn’t sound modern. How could it?
A few hours later, The Essay (Radio 3) – 28 episodes in April, considering Anglo-Saxon figures of significance – included the bones of an anonymous smith buried in a field in Lincolnshire (“a lonely place, a marginal place”). The craftsman was found with his tools and holding a bell rung 12 centuries ago by the lone traveller to indicate that although he was that most frightening of things – solitary – he was not a threat.
Content from our partners
Related
