Sarfraz Manzoor

this is not by me. it is by raymond tallis and i saw it in The Times today. i thought it was a really thoughtful piece and sometimes to reflect on at this time of year

From The Times December 21, 2009

Warning: don’t let auld acquaintance be forgot
Loneliness isn’t just miserable, it is bad for your body and your mind — and it’s contagious. Take care of your friendshipsRaymond Tallis 19 Comments
Recommend? (16) Anyone who has looked after a small child, been subjected to the unregulated prattle of a garrulous companion, or been bombarded by the unremitting demands of a busy job, will rejoice in that uninterrupted solitude to which poets address Great Odes. You close the door, relish the silence, and smile at the prospect of being undisturbed for hours and hours and hours. But there are times when isolation feels a rather mildewed state and there is the realisation, which J.G. Farrell identified as lying “between opening the door and taking off your raincoat”, that you are lonely. Christmas, the season of mandated merriment, which seems a standing rebuke to the non-merry, is just such a time. Instead of feeling sorry for the Divine Tot ill-housed in the legendary manger, many find themselves feeling sorry for Number One.

The divorced, the estranged, the bereaved, the rejected, the aged (of whom half a million will spend Christmas Day alone), will find the overheard or imagined laughter and happiness of others unbearably poignant. Christmases past — when the children were young, when the spouse was alive, when friend after friend knocked at the door, when you were yourself a child, starry-eyed with happy venality, and the meanings of Christmas were so solid you could stand on them — seem like paradise lost. No wonder you mutter “Bah, humbug!” and remind yourself that the traditional family Christmas is an organisational mountain, a bonfire of obligatory consumption leaving a hangover of debts; that this is a time when people who normally avoid each other are together for long enough to find out why; when you used to end up watching the programme on TV or playing the board game that nobody wanted because everybody was too polite to state their wishes. Until, that is, drink or boredom allowed old resentments to surface and rows to break out.

Harrumphing cynicism doesn’t always work. The ubiquity of the external surface of good cheer makes it difficult to evade the sense of being a nose pressed at a window.

Besides, the newspapers are full of articles not only telling you how numerous you lonely people are, and how the social fragmentation over the past few decades has resulted in more and more people living alone or feeling lonely, but also that your loneliness is contagious. A recent study by John Cacioppo, a cognitive and social neuroscientist no less, found that friends of lonely people are more likely themselves to develop feelings of social rejection and become lonely in turn. And there are dozens of articles in high- impact scientific journals, eagerly reported in the popular press, demonstrating how lack of socialising accelerates cognitive decline, and that lonely people like you are more prone to infections, high blood pressure and cancer. What’s more, you are more likely to suffer from insomnia so that you can sit awake all night worrying about the consequences of being lonely.

Loneliness is not only miserable, it seems; it is also dangerous. Friendship is clearly good for you. Neuroscientists say that its complex challenges stimulate the brain, doctors believe that it is a tonic for the body, and all of us recognise that at the very least it can be physiotherapy for the self. So perhaps this should be the time for remembering auld acquaintance and wondering how we might make new ones; the season for thinking about friendship — the elective friendships we make out of acquaintances, and (more daringly) the friendships we might exhume from those fraught relationships with our relatives.

Not that we should be instrumental in our thoughts about friendship; after all, it may have been our somewhat calculating approach to life that brought us to aloneness in the first place.

Genuine friendship, as Aristotle said, is based on goodness rather than utility. And he would, I am sure, have had a dim view of those newer modes of friendship that seem to have partly displaced the old: the e-friendships that we may cultivate in the illusion that, even if we are unloved close up, we may be appreciated for our true value at a distance. The multiplication of the people we interact with through various electronic media — the imaginary friendships we have with our idols, the contacts that are twittered into being or fostered on Facebook or in chat rooms — may delude us into thinking that we are more wired into the lives of others and others are more wired into ours than is the case. Screen-mates, alas, are remote from the real mess of the real world in which real friendships are formed and tested and deepened.

They are simply part of the e-ttenuation of our lives. True friendships include availability at awkward hours and open-ended commitments that are alien to a society based upon contract. Christmas is just the time to discover how little those keystrokes mean.

At any rate being alone at this time of year puts into sharp relief those questions that haunt us about the extent to which we are truly together or whether we are, as T.S. Eliot envisaged in The Waste Land, “sealed each in his prison”. This time, when even the most robust and adjusted solitude may seem a curse rather than a blessing, raises questions about our connectedness with and separation from others. It reminds us, perhaps, that much of the meaning and purpose of life lies in being with people for no other reason than the joy of companionship and the ethical satisfaction of providing mutual caring support. For an atheist such as me, keeping one’s friendships in repair is not a bad theme for Christmas. It might even form the basis of a new year’s resolution.