There are certain kinds of misfortune that I can’t look in the eye. We all have a tendency to turn away from injustice, because we suspect that there is nothing we can do to change it, or because we simply don’t have the energy to confront it ourselves. But I am not speaking about unfathomable tragedies: people being bombed in countries far enough away that we can delude ourselves they are somehow different from us; or the prospect of an already unequal Earth being ravaged by a worsening climate crisis. Like most other people I do nothing concrete to address those issues – but I can at least consider them, look in their direction for more than a split second. Not so with lonely people.
I recently saw the film Nomadland. It is a stark, bleak meditation on a group of people who cannot live in the conventional manner, with a permanent address and steady job, and instead travel the United States in mobile homes. Some of them seem born for this kind of restless lifestyle – such as “Swankie”, who is played not by a professional actor but by Charlene Swankie, a nomad in real life too.
Content from our partners
