Living Alone, Living Together
eBook - ePub

Living Alone, Living Together

Two Essays on the Use of Housing

Peter King

Share book
  1. 136 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Living Alone, Living Together

Two Essays on the Use of Housing

Peter King

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This book, from social theorist Peter King, considers how a dwelling can protect and promote both our anxieties and our relationships. Dwelling magnifies our anxieties and allows us to reject the world, yet it is also what we need to form long and lasting relationships.
The first essay considers the one truly private space we have: inside our heads. This is the most intimate place we have, yet we are singularly unable to control it or even to know it. This leads to a discussion on anxiety and depression and how the solitude offered by private space ā€“ the head and the home ā€“ allows for anxiety to take over an individual. But it is also suggested that it is only through the privacy of a dwelling, and the intimacies that can develop here, that anxiety can be assuaged.
The second essay is based on the premise that our relationships come out of our private dwelling. We need the protected intimacy, the inclusion and exclusion of private dwelling in order to flourish and to grow, and if we are to live together in a fully committed manner we depend on this enclosed and excluding space.
Peter King builds up a new picture of dwelling from first principles. Both essays use a non-traditional literature to explore being alone and being with others, rather than relying on the social science literature, and offer a distinct and original contribution to the housing studies literature.
Peter King is a writer and thinker on housing. He is currently Reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on ā€œCancel Subscriptionā€ - itā€™s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youā€™ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoā€™s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youā€™ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weā€™ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Living Alone, Living Together an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Living Alone, Living Together by Peter King in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Sciences sociales & Sociologie du mariage et de la famille. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

ON LIVING ALONE

There is one place where we know we can retain our privacy, where no one else can enter, where we can keep our secrets. But it is a dark and mysterious place. It is a place where we can be ourselves, but it is also a place we struggle to understand. It is ours but we often cannot control it. It can confound us, confuse us and let us down. But no one else need know the slightest thing unless we let it slip. The place I am referring to is the inside of our head.
Of course, properly speaking, it is not a place at all. The inside of our head is full of organic matter. There is no real space that we can stretch out in or explore as we might a building or a neighbourhood. To call it a place is already to revert to metaphor. It is a ā€˜placeā€™ of thoughts, feeling, emotions and dreams, not somewhere we can actually walk around in.
Despite this, I want to insist that it really is somewhere we can go to. In a very real sense we are in there. It is the most private place that we can go to, where we can be free from all others and where we can hide. If I donā€™t tell anyone what is in my head it can never be known. So we are, or can be, truly alone with our thoughts.
But sometimes it feels like there are competing voices in my head, pushing and pulling in different ways. They contradict each other and leave me confused. They make demands and then deny responsibility; they pull me one way and then mock me for following them.
My head is the place where I plot, plan, think, reflect, and all in perfect privacy. It is a place where I can really be alone. But it is a place I cannot really control. Our head seems to have an infinite storage capacity, but an inconsistent and perverse retrieval system. It is full of tunnels, trapdoors, hidden rooms, inaccessible corridors, detours and misleading directions. Often there is only a dim light or even darkness. We soon find then that we cannot really trust it.
And why does a mood swing, something that we all have from time to time, turn itself into an illness? When does the apparently normal shift in our behaviour turn into depression? Is it merely a matter of turning up the volume? Why, to get to the point, are my private thoughts often overtaken by anxiety and depression?
My headspace gives me a lot of trouble. It may be inaccessible and uncontrollable to others, but it is also often like this for me too. Much of what goes on in there is a mystery to me. I do things I donā€™t wish to, that I know I will later regret. It creates uncertainty and false certainties, false images of myself and of others. It tells lies to me. It leads me astray. It makes me depressed.
Perhaps we have actually less control over our head than the place we live in. We can move house, but we cannot move head. Our head is not so easy to traverse or navigate; it is much harder to tidy up or re-arrange; and we cannot move out to somewhere else: we canā€™t downsize as we get older. We are stuck with the one place all our lives. We even inherit a lot of baggage from our parents, and so we donā€™t even get to choose the dĆ©cor and layout ourselves.
Ā§
So no one but me is inside my head. Why then does it often feel that there is more than one person in there? There seems to be different parts or versions of me competing for space inside my head. These versions seem to be in conflict: there is the good versus the bad, the benign against the selfish, the outward looking battling the inwards, the contented and optimistic me against the alienated and anxious one. At different times one of these versions of me is dominant, and, of course, not always the good ones. We might see this as a battle between angels and devils, good or evil spirits, good or bad ideas, or as different personas. But they are all, properly speaking, me. At any precise moment I do not feel particularly different. It still seems to be me in there. What does differ is the outside world, or rather how it appears: whether it is benign or hostile; whether it is for me or against me; whether it understands me or seems to disregard everything I say or do. What differs is how the world seems to engage with me: does it take me as a member of the human race or as an alien with little in common with it? It often feels as if it is just me against the world. But I, so I tell myself, so I insist, have not changed.
I can only deal with this apparent hostility in one of two ways: by generating my own hostility ā€” anger, rage, shouting back ā€” or by hiding away from the world, by withdrawing, skulking and sulking, by effectively switching off and hibernating away and curling up into a little foetal ball under a blanket and sleeping. I either lash out or I close down. The latter is the most common, but sometimes it follows a short outburst of anger. The anger soon turns inwards, as a sense of simmering resentment against everyone and everything, and I withdraw. In this state everything appears to be monochrome, a uniform grey. I am at the bottom of a well with no clear way out and indeed without any real intention of trying to get out ā€” it is a well I have dug myself, of my own making, even as I resent where, and how, I am. There is no means of escape and no point in trying. I accept where I am and wait for it to pass ā€” I can do this because it is not my fault ā€” muttering some resentful dirge to myself.
At these times I feel totally, completely, absolutely, resolutely alone, and this is even the case if others are with me in the same room. There is no longer any connection, any warmth, any light, anything radiating in or out of me at all. There is just this grey hole with me at the bottom.
How do I come out of this state? And why does it happen when it does? Do I have any choice over this? Perhaps life could simply not go on for long in this grey well. From time to time I need to come up to the surface to replenish myself. This though suggests that the grey well might be the default state, and I couldnā€™t bear to think that.
What does often draws me out ā€” what makes me act differently ā€” is the pull of tenderness: my connection with my wife and children. My feelings towards them start to bear down on the greyness and then come to overpower and dominate it. But why does this happen? Why does life suddenly (or eventually) come to seem positive and benign again? Why cannot I feel this all of the time?
In truth, both the good and the bad sides of me remain present: it is just that one can come to dominate, and I can seemingly do little to control the situation. Sometimes the volume just gets turned up too far. Over the years though I have found no real trigger, no reason for it. I can seldom see the period of greyness coming and predict it. Likewise, I tend to have no inkling of it ending. I am either on one side or the other, completely one and nothing of the other (or so it seems: things are always only as they seem). There is no gradual or gentle slide from one to the other. Yet, at the same time, I do feel a continuity: it is the same me all the time. There is an internal continuity and a feeling that it is the world that now appears to react differently to me and for no reason that I can fathom.
There is something childish in this sense of the world not understanding me, of it actively colluding against me. I cannot get my own way and it is simply so unfair. Sometimes, always afterwards, I can see that this is intensely selfish, as purely wilful, just sulking because I cannot get my way. It then seems all too clear ā€” until the next time.
Ā§
Donā€™t you ever feel afraid? Do you not sometimes feel so lost, abandoned and without anything left to hope for? Is there not sometimes just too much world, such that you are in danger of being overwhelmed? What then do you do? Where do you go? Where do they find you?
Ā§
Why do we withdraw? Why do we close the door and shut the curtains? Is it just to keep warm? Or is it so that we can be properly alone, alone with ourselves and those we love, alone together, or just alone?
Ā§
Enclosure provides us with the antidote to loneliness. The boundaries, just as they keep us apart, help us to forget, and because they enclose, they help us to feel safe within. What we want to forget is now outside, away from and beyond the boundaries. It ā€” they ā€” are not with us, they are not us. They are apart from us.
Ā§
Being alone ā€” away from them, the world, those who donā€™t care ā€” helps us to forget that we might be lonely. We can forget the crowds that are indifferent to us. We can be at the centre, the very heart of things, even as we have restricted it so as only to include ourselves. We are the one who now make things tick. Indeed, we are the world now, held and enclosed against whatever others might try to implicate us in.
Ā§
There is always a bad side and a good side. It is our mutual indifference (stating it negatively) or our mutual respect for others (being positive) that allows us to control our immediate environment. We are left alone and have our aloneness respected by others, most of whom are doing precisely the same as we are. It is not that we wish to ignore others, or that we do not care. Rather it is that we are more concerned for some particular ones and wish to prioritise our care for them. This creates an unintended exclusivity that allows others to proceed without interference from us.
Ā§
What are we alone for? Why are we without others? Perhaps it is because we choose to be. We reject the company of others and choose to live away from them, letting distance exclude us. It might be that we wish to be free of all responsibility and not be held back by others. We wish only to focus on ourselves. Perhaps we wish to achieve enlightenment and some link with the transcendent. Or it might be that we need to detox and to start looking after ourselves properly. Less dramatically, it might be that we are too busy with our career or other interests, which preclude contact with others and so we cannot form relationships. It might be that our obsessions prevent us from seeing others. Then again, we might be alone because we simply cannot find anyone despite looking very hard. No one, we think, is good enough for us. No one meets our expectations of what our lifelong partner should be like. So we choose to be alone rather than put with what we take as second best.
Or it might be that we have no choice. We would love to be with others but are constantly rejected or ignored by them. We might lack the social skills to link with others. We are incurably shy or feel that we are inadequate in some way. Or we may be being punished for our past actions, even to extent of being literally imprisoned and in solitary confinement. But being ignored by others need not be deliberate, but merely that everyone else chooses to be elsewhere and with other people rather than us. We might not be actively rejected but just a victim of indifference.
We might be alone due to bereavement, where we have lost those closest to us. Or we might be alone because of illness of incapacity: we cannot get out to see others and there is no one to come to see us. Both of these might only be temporary, in that grief and illness are things that we can recover from. So this period of isolation might be a transitional phase and, in time, we can connect again.
Ā§
Can we be alone together? Can we be with someone or in a group, but still be alone, where we are not linking with anyone properly, having nothing in common with anyone, being semi-detached from the group, looking on from the periphery, commenting perhaps, assessing, evaluating the group from the edge rather than being a full part of it? We might hold ourselves back for some reason, be it reticence, arrogance, or some other reason. We just cannot commit to the group. We are in the company of others but not really with them. We are still apart and may appear to others to be reserved, haughty, or even hostile. We lack any conviction to participate and to be included. We could quite easily detach ourselves, which might not, because of our reserve, even be much noticed by the others.
In being with others we might be led more by habit and routine than by conviction. Or it might be that we are obliged formally to be a part of a group as part of our studies, our employment or our family commitments. We have to be there, because of the decisions we have made in the past: we want to pass our course, we need to build our career and have money to pay the mortgage, we feel we ought to have some affinity with relatives. But we still have little in common with these people we are with and would not necessarily choose to be in their company were we not so committed.
In might be that we were once closer to others, but we have drifted apart from them. It may be that as teenagers we seek more distance from our parents and siblings. Or it might be where a coupleā€™s interests diverge over time and once the children have left find they have less in common than they thought they had. But even as they drift apart they stay together ā€” there is still something that holds them. This may be due to habit, inertia, or financial necessity. But, more positively, it may be that we still love and care for these people because of the shared history and memories. There remains an accumulated affection and common trust. At times we might notice the drift, but we maintain the relationship because it is where we are and who we are. We are comfortable still with them. There is still enough to keep us together and committed, even if this is for negative rather than positive reasons or simply the weight of years. We are still at home, amongst what is known, stable and comfortable. We cannot contemplate giving this up.
Indeed we often have no real alternative. Where else would we go? We may not be able to afford change even if we wished it. But even so, we may not feel trapped. We might be mildly disappointed, dissatisfied and disaffected, but not exactly unhappy. We do not consider ourselves to be alone. We can still rely on the others around us and we can offer support and comfort to them.
Yet, in a certain way, we are alone. We may be together physically, but not emotionally or spiritually: we do not really share our lives with others anymore. All we share are the routines and the space they take place through and in.
Of course, it is very rare to be completely together ā€” to be always together ā€” with another. We do not always act together as one. We might even say that complete togetherness is not always healthy. We might benefit from some time alone and some space to simply be ourselves. All relationships have their differences in terms of interests, beliefs, opinions and priorities. We may not feel precisely the same about each other: one might feel more connected and committed than the other. In most cases this will not matter. We retain our individuality and do not become overtaken by another or become subsumed into something else. Indeed, we might suggest that being in a relationship with a particular other actually makes some statement about us as a differentiated individual.
Ā§
Anxiety is a state of uneasiness where we are concerned over an imminent danger or difficulty, over something that troubles us. To say we are anxious means we are worried that things might change, that something will or is about to happen or it might be a worry that things will not change and not get any better, that there is no way out of our predicament. But anxiety is often general or non-specific. It frequently takes the form of a generalised sense of unease rather than a specific fear or worry. Anxiety need not be directed at anything specific, although, at any one time, we may think that it is quite specific. This suggests it is within us, and hence the usefulness of the image of a tight ball or knot inside us. We tend to be anxious and experience this serially rather than it being caused by something purely external and specific. We are prone to anxiety in general rather than it arising from a single and temporary cause. It might be best therefore to see it as a disposition or an illness and not a particular reaction to circumstance.
Anxiety then comes from within us instead of from some external cause. While a fear might be imposed on us, our anxieties are what we impose on ourselves by attaching it to some external entity. Anxiety is where we have a sense of dread, which may be attached at one time to something specific but then we find it has moved on to something else.
We can see anxiety as where we cannot contain a situation. The situation goes beyond us and we feel we are not in control of it. The object of anxiety looms out at us and we cannot suppress our feelings, which continue to grow. We have no proper sense of proportion or means of keeping issues within bounds or to place them in their proper context. The object of anxiety so pervades our consciousness that we cannot see beyond it. To achieve this object, or to survive it, to get past it, is all that matters to us. What we tend to forget, to lose sight of in our anxiety, is that this object ā€” be it a journey, a meeting, lecture, or whatever ā€” is usually only a stage in a process, a means to achieve something larger, part of a series of events and objects to negotiate towards a greater aim. Yet we cannot see this, our anxiety masks this from us, so we cannot see it as it is.
Of course once the journey or event is over and we have achieved it, we can then see it for what it is and that our anxiety was misplaced and unfounded. The journey was indeed straightforward and we can now appreciate that what matters more is what we can do on our arrival. Anxiety can be controlled, or put into proportion, only in hindsight. We cannot deal with it in advance. And so this tiny victory, of apparently beating anxiety by doing what we dreaded, does not necessarily stop us feeling anxious the next time we go on a journey or face a similar meeting. Hence it really is significant to see anxiety as coming from inside and not dependent on external circumstances. Anxiety is very adept at finding its own stimulation.
Ā§
Do I spend too long on the inside, too long on introspection? Why am I hidden away in my own headspace and not in the outside world? Is it that I can actually find enough within my own headspace that I donā€™t need to go out, that almost my entire world is there? Should I find comfort in this?
Ā§
Waking up anxious again! What for? What have I to worry about? Why have I woken up now?
But then why does there have to a reason? Why do I have to be anxious about anything in particular? My anxiety, it seems to me, is often general and non-specific. It has no point of focus, no target. I do not think I am anxious about anything. It seems instead that anxiety picks the nearest thing and inflates it. Or perhaps I am anxious about everything ā€” of just being here and still having to face the world.
But here I am, at 4.00 in the morning, in the dark and prickling with anxiety, tossing and turning, worrying about I know not what. Slowly it will fade, or nearly always it will, and come morning I feel...

Table of contents