Excerpt from The Age of Loneliness
BY LAURA MARRIS
Lost Lake
As we walk, I ask my father why the lake is called lost. To me, the place seems easy enough to spot—a shallow body of water curving behind the trees. We navigate a path along the rocky edge, a little disoriented until the woods fall away and we can see the blue of the sky returning in the brackish mirror. I’ve hiked this trail so many times I can’t remember how old I am in this instance—seven, maybe eight—dawdling through Connecticut’s Westwoods, close to where we live, an easy choice for a Saturday afternoon. The trees are bare, except for the scraps on last season’s oak saplings, turned brittle and brown without falling. I put one foot in front of the other, watching out for heaves in the frost-thawed ground.
When my father starts to explain, his voice falls over my shoulders and I can almost see it like weather, shaping the atmosphere around me. As usual, he starts from the beginning. Or at least, he chooses a beginning, and I’m too young to question if that’s where the story should start. This particular name came from settlers, surveyors, who stumbled on the lake, he says. When they began to map its edges, they didn’t yet know about the small channel connecting it to the nearby marsh. This lake is saltwater, my father says. When tides ebb, it can disappear. He tells me that when the early surveyors tried to return to the lake, they thought they had lost it, because they came back at low tide. They wandered through the brambles and reeds, looking for the shoreline they had plotted, but it had become a meadow of salt grass—the edges were no longer the same. Impossible to get your bearings from a lake that doesn’t stay put.
When we reach the overlook, the water is slack, shining in the sun. Clumps of reeds and islands, where rocks give way to lichen. My father hands me the sandwich he’s carried, the bottle of cold tap water. I swing my legs over a ledge of granite, bounce the rubber heels of my sneakers off the stone. It’s the season for cleaning up yards and burning leaves, and the breeze carries the smell of curled ash. There’s a slight haze in the air, as there often is on warm February days, when nearby sea holds the heat of the land. But the soft edges in the distance also help with the sense of mystery. How does the lake fill through such a narrow gap? I ask. He says there are ways for water to move underground, too, that we see only some of its movements. But if you dig down you can find it, like with a deep enough hole at the beach.
Lost Lake is still drawn on the map, I say, even though it empties? And he nods. I’m beginning to understand that absence itself could be a landmark. That sometimes, to know where you are, you have to navigate by what’s not there.
~
When I try to name my own relationship with somewhere like Lost Lake, the best word I have is landscape. Landscape, in this sense, is a word for the tension between human immersion and how that presence transfigures a place. It’s not the picturesque or the wilderness or the “untouched.” Even in the most casual sense, real world landscapes are composed, characterized by humans, for aesthetic and political ends. And landscapes are also defined by what many people exclude from this careful framing—the shadow side of trash, toxins, histories of erasure, devastation, extractive practices that harm other beings. While environments and ecosystems are part of landscape, they also exist outside this framework, subverting human expectations through the sheer complexity of the living world. By contrast, a landscape is a human construction—a term for how each person’s life has touched and entwined with the places they’ve known and how they carry traces of where they’ve been. As a result, landscapes are both collective context and deeply personal. It’s possible, as historian Daegan Miller puts it, to “follow the landscape back into a person’s mind and watch as she dreams it into being.” At a moment when the living world is rapidly changing, I’m drawn to landscapes as flash points between what people perceive about a place and what gets edited out. They also beg the question: What am I not seeing?
A few years ago, I began to notice that I was editing out a specific category of experience. Though I was flying all the time for work, and spending part of each week away from the house I shared with my husband, Matt, I kept thinking I could pass through spaces of travel without being affected by them, without them leaving a mark on me. Whole days at the airport under the loudspeaker with earbuds jammed in my ears. Vistas of linoleum stretching for miles. Lyft rides in traffic on elevated highways—I’d never spent so much time in places people tried to get through on their way to somewhere else.
When I think of the airport, I think of the plate glass windows, how they bracket the sky you’re about to enter. I’ve seen at least a hundred dusks turn blue in those windows. Until the darkness seeps across the horizon and the glass becomes a mirror, reflecting back the long passages of people, the crowds massing as they wait. At the airport you can feel the human and the neon jumbled together on the escalators, on the moving walkways, where you can watch yourself pass as though you were a package on a conveyor belt, funneled through space to reach the right barcode scanner, the one that opens the mouth of the gate.
One night, at the airport in a thunderstorm, I was waiting on a delayed flight. And I noticed that the water on the glass fell silently, unable to break through the noise of the terminal. I was longing to be somewhere else—to sleep in my own bed and wake up to the sound of rain on the roof. I wanted to walk away, into the drenched edges of the airfield, and think with my whole body and all its entanglements. To be somewhere (and someone) it was possible to touch.
This longing for the rain made me uncomfortable. It felt too much like loneliness, a feeling I reflexively repressed. In college, after my father died, I’d learned that it’s dangerous to be lonely, to reveal, beneath the still surface, a deepening eddy of need. One reason I’d gone to school near him was so I could visit when he was sick, but I didn’t expect him to be gone so quickly, to be wrapped so soon in the shadow-world of grief’s associations, which were incomprehensible to most of the other nineteen-year-olds around me and which only exacerbated my sense that I was alone.
When he began to die, it was summer, and I was in France, trying to learn the language that would make me a translator. I got to the airport as quickly as I could. After the flight across the Atlantic, I rode to New Haven on the Amtrak train, whose tracks cross the narrow channel that feeds Lost Lake. For a few passing seconds I could see where we’d hiked as the inlet slipped through my pale reflection in the window. In the nights that followed, I stood by his bedside, thinking of the shallow water as the train crossed the trestle, rattling the conduits of salt. How I stood by the ebbing pool of his last conscious hours—when the tides changed and his hands rippled in the air as if to music—the firing of neurons at the edge of thought’s dissolution.
~
Now when I ask the town historian about Lost Lake, he tells me that the railroad filled in some of the salt marsh when it built the tracks. The infrastructure for the bridge functioned like a dike, narrowing the channel and flooding the tidal meadow. So it was the train that created the lake. But no one I ask—not the head of the land trust, not the librarian in the town’s archive, not the neighbors—can confirm the origin of the name.
When someone dies in a place and their relatives go on living there, that landscape is infused with their loss. I haven’t set foot on the trail to Lost Lake since my father died—I no longer know what’s going on in that particular corner of woods. Are the swamp maples still the first to turn in the fall? Does the winter wren still flex her sides to pour out her song, as if she could empty herself? During those long airport hours, I started to think about the loss of these other forms of kinship. If studies show that just being around other creatures and their habitats increases feelings of well-being in people, reduces stress, and relieves loneliness, what happens when the ease of that proximity is diminished, or altered, or made merely transactional?
Though most people think of the current era as the Anthropocene, the age of human impacts in the fossil record, there’s another name circulating among artists and environmentalists like a warning, a name coined by the late biologist E. O. Wilson. In a time of great wildlife loss, when people and corporations have often pushed out other species to make space “by, for, and of ourselves,” he prefers to call the coming age “the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.”
In Greek, the word eremos can be applied to a lonely person, but it also means a desolated place. There’s a doubleness to this lens, a reciprocity: when people monopolize a place, we often deprive ourselves of sharing it with the abundance of other living beings. “I have frequent conversations with students who have almost normalized this prospect,” writes the author Robert Macfarlane, “they feel themselves involuntarily to be entering . . . ‘The Age of Loneliness,’ in which our depletion of more-than-human communities results in an emptied, echoing earth.”
What I realized in the airport was that when I spent time in a lonely landscape, I instinctively felt it, and I just as instinctively pushed that feeling away. It alarmed me that I, too, had almost normalized the emptiness, for reasons that tangled with the personal, even as they went beyond it.
~
My long-distance habit predated Matt by four years and two different relationships. In grad school, through a Boston winter, I flew across the country alone because I wanted to keep dating someone who had moved away, someone I thought I loved. And how can you not fall in love, when your time together is a series of weekend vacations, escapes from the treeless streets of Allston and the long lights waiting to cross Commonwealth Ave? In between visits I would slip into a loneliness so quiet and cavernous that I hardly realized what was happening until its symptoms were clear. It became hard to eat when I was alone—all appetite gone, as if the hunger could only sustain itself by being answered and reflected in another person’s company. Left to my own devices, I’d fall into a parallel world of dazed hours spent at the library, trying not to write about my father. I didn’t want his absence to seep in and occupy this city, too. But it did, of course it did. I was his only child—wherever I lived, the shadow of his death caught up to me.
It’s possible to forget an absence for a while if you cut yourself off from your places and how they remind you. Once, ice buried the Northeast just before I was supposed to fly to San Francisco, where this then boyfriend lived, and I moved from window to window as I watched the plows, desperate for crews to clear the roads in time. Then, takeoff, the hours of suspension, the descent into a city where spring had already come in February and the branches were blooming with flowers whose names I didn’t know. After four brief days of greenness, he tried to break up with me as we sat on the steps of his apartment drinking coffee, while the sun highlighted each barbed leaf of an aloe plant in its terra-cotta pot. I don’t remember exactly what he said, only that the tones of his voice were measured, reasonable, gentle. Something like Maybe our lives are going in different directions. At first, his casualness stunned me. But as we waited for the BART train that would take me back to the airport, I realized that he had spent the whole weekend deliberating about it—while we basked in Dolores Park and ate takeout with our fingers, he’d been drafting this exit speech in his mind.
In the days that followed, I stopped contacting him, because I knew that space was the only thing we had that would fix us. I floated through days of dirty Boston snow until my friend Nell took me to the aquarium, where we stepped into a darkened room to watch moon jellies drift their iridescent cloverleafs through the tank. She took a picture of me standing in front of the glass, and in the photo you can see my shadow (my shade) behind me, looking like the more substantial half.
For me, living three thousand miles apart didn’t mean we had to give up our love. A few nights a month in the same bed, the warmth of another coast—that was enough for me to keep going. The writer Hanif Abdurraqib says that to sleep next to someone is to “fall into the space that is mine and they fall into the space that is theirs and for a minute, there is a kingdom that we are keeping briefly warm and even if it is not love, it is love.” I wanted a kingdom of warmth, even if it was a place I could only visit. I felt a loyalty to that kingdom, to that person, to our temporary country of non-loneliness. I even felt loyal to the way we missed each other when we were apart—missing as proof enough of affection. And for a little while, he relented and we stayed together, for almost the rest of that year. I paid my tithe in airport hours—and always showed up at the gate.
One of my professors in grad school put it well, probably after reading another bad poem I had written about getting on a plane. Maybe you like long-distance relationships, she said, because you’re accustomed to absence.
~
“I am not sure what inner forces have made me, during the last years, ponder about and struggle with the psychiatric problems of loneliness,” writes the psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann in an essay published in 1959. “I have found a strange fascination in thinking about it—and subsequently in attempting to break through the aloneness of thinking about loneliness by trying to communicate what I believe I have learned.”
When Matt entered my life, my loneliness became less constant, less like a force that would swallow me, and more of a “strange fascination” that bloomed when we were apart. I could notice the curves and edges of the feeling, the slight pinch when it began, like the way Novocain aches as it gives way to numbness. If I play back Fromm-Reichmann’s last sentence, “break through the aloneness of thinking about loneliness,” I hear a familiar recursiveness, an uncomfortable wanting to share the sensations of this parallel world, even as it risks isolating you. When I said that it’s dangerous to be lonely, this is what I meant—that trying to share loneliness, to talk about the vulnerability of that longing, always runs the risk of making people uncomfortable, as if it were a pathology, a contagion, and not a human response to living in a society that is often emotionally disconnected, ready to ignore a deep ache just because it might seem unfixable, or sad. When I feared my own loneliness, I suspect, it was partly because this hunger had spooked me when I’d encountered it in others. “Loneliness seems to be such a painful, frightening experience that people will do practically everything to avoid it,” Fromm-Reichmann continues. But Matt didn’t react like that. I’m not afraid of your feelings, he would say, and the openness of his face made my own fear recede.
When I confessed that I was having trouble falling asleep alone, he would tell me stories he’d made up over the course of the day, speaking into the phone until I finally surrendered my wakefulness, lulled by the sound of his voice. One story, early on, was about a boy who lives by himself in the woods next to a conveyor belt, like the people movers at the airport but longer, a moving walkway that stretches from horizon to horizon. Each day, the belt brings the boy new surprises—strangers, old car parts, raiders who want to take his farm. He builds walls, defenses, becomes expert at hiding when strangers arrive. Then, one morning, he decides to investigate and starts running on the moving walkway in the opposite direction, toward the source.
Fromm-Reichmann is right: most people would do practically anything to escape loneliness. At first, I thought the travel was just what Matt and I had to get through, to survive what academics call the two-body problem of being a couple without having jobs in the same place. I told myself I was flying so that someday, somewhere, we could live together in the space of fragile warmth we had created. I couldn’t yet admit how much I needed the connections I hoped would share that space, the people and plants and animals, the world of associations, the projects completed and abandoned, the meshwork of collaborative metaphors. “I didn’t want to grow older in a box, I wanted to grow older on a web,” the writer Erica Berry puts it. The airports always hollowed me out but I kept moving through them, flinging small blue texts like balloons into his weather hey, hi, how are you? Little messages stitching the void.
~
In fields that depend on remote sensing, there is a concept called ground-truth. Meteorology and aviation rely on radar and mapping, but ground-truth is usually a human process—the need for people to find out, through firsthand observation, what’s actually going on in a place. If a rainstorm was predicted, is it really pouring? There is a forecast or mapped reality, and then there is the ground-truth of Lost Lake’s tidal shore.
Looking at it on the map, you would never know that Boston’s airport is also a lost landscape. Before this place was runways, it was water: the sea between a brace of islands. The shoreline was an estuary, where tides reversed the flow of the creeks. In the spring the snowmelt would flood down into the marshes, and in winter, ice would pucker along the edges of the mudflats that are now disappeared. The wetlands under Logan were full of fish, herons, raccoons, deer. Three of the original islands—Bird, Governors, and Apple—are still buried beneath Logan’s fill, as is a park called Wood Island, where families from the surrounding neighborhood dug clams, sunbathed, and dipped their feet in the harbor. Of course, as climate change causes sea levels to rise, the area around the airport has become wetter, marshier. The airport has developed a resiliency plan to safeguard its terminals, to avoid the creep of sea, to privilege the human ability to fly. But as Toni Morrison points out in her classic essay “The Site of Memory,” filled land is prone to flooding, and water has a longer story than any human intervention. “‘Floods’ is the word they use,” she writes, “but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
~
Once, I flew in a blizzard so bad that the air was as white as the runway. When the plane bounced on landing, I gripped the armrests because I thought it was turbulence, that we were still wrapped in cloud. And I knew Matt was on the other side of arrivals, one of the few people waiting for this handful of passengers who’d dared to board the only flight that got through. I walked outside, into the snow-filled wind that refracts its own brightness, even at night. And before I stepped into the car, I felt Matt’s nearness in the wild air, how it filled me with such luck, such weightlessness to be buffeted down the sidewalk, to be both snowed in and in love. And also, as the car door closed and the air went still, how estranged, how divided to burn jet fuel through extreme weather—to accept that as people, the airport promised us connection, but as passengers we were isolated, cut off from every ecological reality of where we were and where we were going.
Biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer puts it like this: “As our human dominance of the world has grown, we have become more isolated, more lonely.” I started to wonder if, in the Eremocene, loneliness could be a helpful feeling because it makes it harder to overlook what’s missing. There’s a strength—a stubbornness—to being lonely, to insisting on the importance of what’s no longer there. To wonder why you never hear a certain bird anymore. To go on a summer road trip and hit only a couple of bugs. To realize, while passing a beach, that there used to be many more horseshoe crabs. To listen for spring peepers and hear just a few. Unlike grief, which is acute and often a response to finality, loneliness hums in the background, but if you tune in to its frequency, it can reveal something about the ways people have often become isolated from the living world. Loneliness is worth listening to because it longs for reconnection—a hurt that illuminates its antidote, a symptom that desires its cure.
To begin to notice ecological diminishment, even anecdotally, I had to pay attention to loneliness. I wanted to understand what it would be like to be a “citizen of longing,” in the writer Anne Boyer’s terms—to live alongside the losses in these landscapes in a way that might be helpful, real. And once I began to notice, I often found that I wasn’t alone.
~
Each December, in places all across the US and around the world, small groups of people gather in parking lots and on lakeshores, armed with binoculars and spotting scopes. Many have been showing up for years on the same Sunday, in snow and rain, giving up their day off from other jobs to spend twenty-four hours counting birds. For a long time, these people have been known as citizen scientists, but now, for obvious reasons, people often call it community science instead. Each year, these cold, wet, wind-bedraggled volunteers gather population data for biologists and ecologists, comparing numbers of owls, or mockingbirds, or crossbills from one year to the next. People find both human and more-than-human community through these long days, searching with others for a particular species of concern, to tally the rise and fall of their numbers over time. In changing environments, community science projects helped me to be aware of shared loneliness as a feature of life that could be restorative, that could connect people who’d noticed the same something was missing and wanted to ground-truth their woods.
Many of my earliest experiences of the living world were shaped by my father, who participated in community science projects like these, especially when they involved looking for birds. When we walked in the woods, he would stop short, binoculars lifted, capturing me with his stillness. Then he would ask if I wanted to see. My small hands hinging the lenses closer, to fit the distance between a child’s eyes. The black shadows at the edges of the circle, double vision until the adjustment was right. And then, a sharpness—distant wings brought close.
When he died, I found some of his bird lists from the eighties in the back of a folder, lists written out in longhand, with all the notes and cross-outs of a dedicated amateur. He didn’t know that I’d keep them, that I’d try to retrace the paths that lead to their names. There are worse inheritances than a pile of bird lists and a map of Lost Lake I’ve drawn from memory, of a trail to a place whose shoreline doesn’t hold.
