By my count, there have been three books published in the last 15 years with the title, at least in part, of Alone Together. In my book, I quote the line “alone together so much shared” from Samuel Beckett’s odd, eerie, but also beautiful play about solitude and memory Ohio Impromptu. In some ways, the play is about the solace of reading, its two characters being Reader and Listener. But I also treat alone together as an Irish bull, a contradiction in terms that has a potentially deeper meaning.
The more recent works came to my attention today as the result of a book review in The Washington Post (I left DC several years ago and may never return but still subscribe to the city’s “newspaper of record” as a way of staying in touch with media that is more liberal than I might otherwise gravitate toward). The book in question, Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19, looks a bit opportunistic and trendy/timely in ways that seem negative or at least maudlin and navel-staring to me. Based on the review, the writers seem to be locked into their homes and feeling sorry for themselves. I guess that describes almost all writers. Haha.
But I am grateful at least that this new book made me aware of another one, most recently published in 2017 (first published in 2011), called Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other by an MIT professor named Sherry Turkle. This one seems to get more to an issue that has creeped up on me in the past five or so years. I have always been susceptible to escapism in the form of literature, plays, music, and movies. But this book seems to deal with a more recent phenomenon that affects many of us to greater or lesser degrees, namely, how online interaction is replacing and in some ways degrading human sociability. I may get a copy of Turkle’s book.
But back to art. Sigmund Freud said something like, “the poets got there first.” And I think “alone together” was a phrase and idea that Beckett reached ahead of his time in some ways. More recently, an episodic TV series that I like, Black Mirror, aired a good episode called “Smithereens” about a man who has abused a social media platform like Facebook and blames its founder, a Mark Zuckerberg-like character played by Topher Grace, for the resulting loss of his wife’s life. Interestingly Grace’s character is taking a “digital detox” away from online contact when the deranged user of his platform tries to reach him. This is a roundabout way of saying I think we have something to learn from art. Sometimes it gets to the point faster than science.