Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - When You’re Lonely, Life is Very Long

Episode Date: March 3, 2014

After moving to New York alone, writer Olivia Laing discovered the truth about loneliness. She says it is a gift.  Eric Klinenberg explains why more and more people are choosing to live alone and why cities like New York must invest in housing stock that singletons actually want to live in, the type of housing they have in Scandinavian countries.  In Denmark when someone dies alone, and no-one claims the body, the authorities put an ad in the newspaper calling for Possible Relatives. This is also the title of a photo-book by Danish photographer Tina Enghoff.  She tells us about the pictures she took of the apartments after the dead were removed. Some of these bodies went undiscovered for months. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This episode is called When You're Lonely, Life is Very Long. A few years ago, writer Olivia Lange fell in love with another writer she met at McDowell, writer's camp. They decided to move to New York City and live together. But just as she was packing up her things in London, their relationship fell apart. So I moved to New York alone. Olivia recently wrote about this period of her life for Aeon magazine. It's an essay about what loneliness can do to a person

slash manifesto about what loneliness can do to a person slash manifesto about what loneliness can do for a person. It was a really rough time in a way. It was a really blue time in a way. And at the same time, I had these sort of odd encounters that I felt like I would never have had if I'd been in a couple or if I'd been, you know, I'm a writer, I don't have a day job, that I'm working kind of on my own at odd hours all the time. So I felt like I was seeing this sort of undercity or ghost city of other people who were living in the same sort of way. And I started feeling like there was actually a real solidarity, a solidarity of the solitary, I kept calling it to myself. I was in a cafe right at the beginning of my time in New York

and, you know, I was at the time very sad. So I was sort of watching... I watched this guy come in and he was homeless. I suppose he was in his 60s. And he came in and he had a bag and he sat down at a table and then he got up and threw something away. And as he threw something away, he pulled out an empty coffee mug from the bin, from the trash can, and took it over and had it on his table as a sort of decoy so that he could sit there for a while looking like he was a customer.

And he sat there sort of very dignified and ate a couple of pieces of bread from his bag of bread and then packed it away all very neatly and I was kind of watching this encounter feeling like okay well here's the guy who's really lonely but at the time I was also I'd been crying and our eyes met and we were both had exactly the same expression which was sympathy and shame we both were feeling sorry for each other and embarrassed to have been caught in this state and there was a kindness in that exchange there was something in that exchange and that made me feel really like this is a rich world this is a really rich world it might not be particularly personal comfortable but there is a rich world, this is a really rich world. It might not be particularly pleasant or comfortable, but there is a lot going on in it. It felt like a sort of very outlying state,

and I was interested in sort of surveying this state that felt kind of like the sort of place that you travel to and go, whoa, I don't like it, I'm going home, I'm checking out. So I guess it was perverse maybe to stay, but I wanted to. I wanted to get to grips with it. I wanted to get to the bottom of it. So Olivia took the plunge into the void of loneliness. And once her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she made a number of startling connections. I started becoming really interested in loneliness and art, loneliness and sexuality, loneliness and secrecy,

the sort of different ways that people become lonely. And our classic sense of somebody who's, you know, extremely lonely is the shut-in, isn't it? It's the hoarder. It's the person who's kind of got thousands and thousands of bags and objects surrounding them. And it suddenly struck me that there's this really interesting correlation between that and certain kinds of visual art. Olivia is fascinated by the artists Henry Darger and Andy Warhol. The two led very different lives, but they were both hoarders.

Henry spent most of his life in a tiny apartment. Andy lived his on the international stage. Henry kept all his belongings in his room. Andy put all his stuff in boxes that he called time capsules. Olivia says they both have a lot to teach us about loneliness. But for her, the artist with the real gift of loneliness, that's David Von Arovich. So he's this fantastic artist, writer, filmmaker

who died of AIDS very young, 37 I think he was. He talked about making art as a way of feeling less lonely, making something that felt like his internal world expressed externally, and also leaving that as a sort of way marker for other people who were of his tribe, who were like him. And that just fascinated me, that idea that... There was something very courageous about it, I thought, and that sort of sense that you can make these worlds

and that people will either not see them or they will see them. They'll kind of click onto it and recognise that it's something for them, that it speaks to them or it speaks for them. In the late 1970s, David Von Arovich took a series of photographs wearing a paper mask of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, posing with iconic New York City landmarks like a Times Square marquee, the Coney Island parachute jump, the Port Authority bus terminal.

That's the image, Olivia says, that pierced her heart and gave her the truth about what it means to be lonely. To me, that's just such an incredible image of sort of alienation and connection and the possibilities of will you make it, will you not make it. The hunger for connection that you feel in loneliness, I suppose that's the sort of key desire of it isn't it, if you kind of separate it out. The hunger of desire makes you very open, it makes a very sort of open heart and lets one who is in that state really feel the impact of works of art, moments of connection, moments of beauty. There is something of living together in groups, and we now have about 50 years playing around with this new

way of arranging our lives and our households on our own. It is a massive transformation. Eric Kleinenberg is a sociologist and the author of Going Solo, The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. I actually find it difficult to imagine that people who choose to live alone were once looked down on and pitied by society. Because today, especially in expensive cities like San Francisco and New York, people who live alone, well, they flaunt it. It's like one of the first things they'll tell you about themselves if you meet them at a party or on the subway. If you can get your own place as a young adult living in a city, that means, you know, you're not living in your parents' basement. You do not have to deal with roommates. You know,

you are making it. You know, this is like a great sign of success. According to Eric, going solo has become a modern rite of passage. If you don't become an adult by getting married and having kids, there's something that defines that experience or that transition. And increasingly, it's getting a place of your own. You grow up when you leave behind your roommates or get out of your parents' home. But the singletons Eric introduces us to in his book have not found a way to live without loneliness. In fact, many of them willingly embrace it. One of the most profound things I heard in my interviews with people

was this notion that as lonely as it can sometimes feel to live alone, there's really nothing lonelier than living in a bad marriage. There's nothing lonelier than being with someone with whom you're not connecting because, you know, look, you're home alone. You feel lonely. You make a phone call. You get off your couch and go to a bar. You try to make plans to see friends.

Like a little bit of loneliness when you're living alone can actually be productive. But you're home with your spouse lying in bed night after night feeling lonely. That's a much more difficult, profoundly difficult situation. There are millions of singletons out there, and the majority of them are leading rich and fulfilled lives. One of the reasons so many people are living alone is because they are taking more time in the beginning of their 20s and 30s to learn who they are, to figure out who they are,

what they want in their lives, what they're looking for in a partner. And if you have a place of your own, you have even more opportunity to kind of experiment with your life, with dating. There's a whole thesis out there that there's this age of independence that we have that we never had before. There's also a lot of evidence now that people who are single and living alone are in fact more socially active than people who are married. They're more likely to spend time

with friends and with neighbors than people who are married. No shocker that they're more likely to go to bars and restaurants and cafes and meet new people there. it is really surprising that they are more likely than married people to volunteer in civic organizations. So they are engaged in the world in ways that we haven't really recognized in the past. We have this notion that there are selfish singles, that singles are narcissists. And the evidence just shows that that's not right. Now, I have a lot of friends who would prefer to live alone, but it's simply not possible, especially here in New York where I live. The rent is too damn high.

But according to Eric, there are cities, mostly in Europe, where living alone is more than a luxury good. Living alone is something you find in places that have a lot of affluence and also in places that have strong welfare states. So there's a lot of people living alone in the United States, but it's in fact far more common proportionately in the Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Norway and Finland and Denmark. In Stockholm, Erik toured an apartment building that was designed for people who choose to live alone. The rooms were small, but there were plenty of shared kitchens,

exercise rooms, common spaces, places for residents to come together. These kinds of buildings are extremely popular with all age groups and genders. And while most urban environments already have a lot of the infrastructure singletons need to survive, Eric says American cities like New York are going to have to invest in this kind of housing stock because in the future, more and more people are going to want to live alone. What's so interesting about the Scandinavian countries

is that the welfare state affords individuals the chance to be free in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be. People can make decisions about what they most want and how they want to live because they know that they will be taken care of, that the fundamental kinds of insecurities that they might have to deal with will be managed. They have health care.

They have retirement benefits. They have good public transit. They have a social infrastructure in cities that works and encourages public engagement. So they don't need to worry as much about whether they live with other people. And I think the mind-bending conclusion that I came to at the end of Going Solo is that it really is our interdependence that makes our independence possible. It's places like Stockholm, or really New York City as well, that allow so many people to live alone

because there's so much interdependence among people who live there. The set of social services on offer is actually fairly abundant. The streets work well and encourage outdoor behavior. We can live by ourselves in those places because we don't need to worry quite as much about having our needs taken care of. Can you prove that you can die of loneliness? That's the question. Tina Enghoff is a Danish photographer who spent years photographing apartments in which people had died alone, truly alone. Some of the bodies

went undiscovered for months. I asked my friend Pike Malinowski, who's also a Dane and a radio producer, to meet up with Tina the last time he went home to Copenhagen. The whole thing started a summer afternoon. Tina was living on Vesterbro at the time, the red light district of Copenhagen. She saw a lot of drugs there, a lot of prostitutes and alcoholics. Still, there was a sense of bohemian camaraderie. People looked out for each other. We were all young and we knew each other. We were in the arts and, you know, having a great time. But one day this illusion was shattered. I saw ambulances and police cars coming.

From the window, Tina is watching the building across from her. People running up and down the stairs and stuff. I said, what is going on here? I couldn't figure out. Down in the street, she runs into a neighbor who had been complaining about a bad smell in the hallway. It's an old house, you know, it was kind of rotten and bad condition, so he didn't think too much about it. But then, a friend who was studying medicine dropped by. And he came in and he said, you know what, this is the smell of death. It's not just a rotten house. And he called the police and a woman has been lying for three weeks in her apartment, dead in the summertime, in the heat.

And that smells. Maybe she had no family, no friends. But Denmark has great social services. Society had failed this woman. And she wasn't the only one. Tina discovered this was happening all the time. So she decided to do something with her camera. Figure out who these people were.

What went wrong. I didn't need to photograph dead people. Everybody knows how they look. But I wanted to know about their life. Lives that seemed so alien to Tina at first. I remember there was one woman, one of the first photographs that worked for me, was a woman I saw on her birth certificate that she was the same age as I was. That was strange. How old were you at that point? I was 45. Yeah. That's too young

to just die, you know. So yes, you can actually die of loneliness. In Denmark, when somebody dies and no one claims the body, the authorities will place an ad in the newspaper calling for possible relatives. So the title possible relatives comes from these ads. The title of Tina's photo book. And very, very seldom somebody calls. But you have them nearly every second day in the Danish newspapers. Often these people leave no evidence of connections to other people or the outside world.

Like family photos, for instance. There was never any family pictures in any of these apartments. Though in that first apartment of the woman Tina's age, she did find a lot of photos plastered all over the walls. But these were pictures of, believe it or not, beautiful people cut out of the newspaper. Actors or stars? Exactly, actors and stars, yeah, yeah. And what I also found in this apartment, which was scary, was a whole bunch of applications for jobs that you never know if she ever sent them or what, you know.

Before Tina even took her first photo, she had been through a long struggle with the city administration to get access. The woman I called who was like the head of their department, she said, are you crazy? You know, no way. I mean, I would never, ever let you get into these apartments. And it was like, what? I mean, here I am. I have this wonderful idea that I think is so important. And one person is stopping me to do it. But Tina was persistent. She called this woman every day for half a year. And eventually she got a meeting.

She saw the work I've been doing before and somehow she suddenly understood that I was not somebody who wanted to do a quick story. And she said, I will give you access for three months and I want to see everything you've been doing to say if it's okay to continue. So Tina gets connected with a man whose job it is to assess these apartments. He's called a caretaker. Katersmester in Danish. His only job is to go into these apartments and look for contacts. Are there any money, you know? Are there things that he should move, you know?

They went into the apartments right after the bodies had been removed. Often, the smell was overwhelming. There's one picture in the book, which I think is a very, very scary picture. Should we look at that? We could, yeah, let's do that. This one. You're looking at grey wall-to-wall carpets. A purple couch with a big, strange-looking stain on it.

Above it, a red telephone. This is like a calling system that somebody put up here. Oh, from a nursing service? Exactly, exactly. Some kind of nursing service, you know. And at the same time, you look at this couch here and you say, what happened

here? It's that strange yellow stain I mentioned before. And then you see it's human skin. Oh my god. Yeah. Oh my god, that's human skin. That person has been lying dead for a long time. Even though he had a phone, even though he had a calling system. You can learn a lot about how someone lived by looking at the apartment they died in. The more lonely you become, the more you creep into the corner. You do everything in one room.

The other rooms were very often empty. There are many dirty couches in these pictures. You sleep on the couch, you eat on the couch. There's one couch that looks like an animal is living on it. When you get so lonely, you don't want to deal with anything. You don't even clean anymore. You don't eat on a plate anymore. Everything is happening here.

Here the leg on the couch has fallen off, as you can see, but he used his old shoes. A pair of gym shoes is propping up the corner of the couch. Tina photographs a number of apartments, and after three months she's back with the woman from the city showing her the pictures. And she said to me, you know, it's a long time since I felt like crying. And I think that was strong for her. I mean, she has been in these kind of apartments many times,

and she knew exactly what she was dealing with, you know. So Tina can continue photographing the apartments. Now, even with the blessings of the city administration. what she was dealing with, you know. So Tina can continue photographing the apartments, now even with the blessings of the city administration. But not too long after that, something happens. The woman who gave her permission disappears. Why? Do you want the real story?

Sure. I think the real story is really scary because what happened is that this woman that actually gave me permission was fired. Tina says she thinks it had nothing to do with her project. But I believe she might be a little naive about this. In my mind, there's little doubt that she was fired over these photos. And suddenly, there was a new boss there. And the guy that I went around with. The caretaker. His name was Mons.

He said to me, Tina, listen, do not ask him. You will never get a yes. Never. He will stop you. And he said, I made a plan. When you have your exhibition at this art hall, I will take my pension. I will retire. Yeah, I will retire, exactly. I will retire. I know I should have

asked my boss if we could have continued but I also know I will stop you in what you're doing so that's my plan wow

so he put his job online for you he did that he absolutely did that and I for a long time after when I went out to talk about this project

and he came I always ask people to stand up and applaud him, you know. Because he did something that was what you call it in Danish, civil courage, which is important, you know.

Something about Tina's work made Måns see these lonely rooms differently. Convinced him that the public should see them too, even if it meant him losing his job. I'm looking at the front cover of Tina's book. For me, it's the most striking image of them all. It's a picture of the corner of a room. It's so simple and terrifying. A grey, plush carpet.

Nice wallpaper. Nothing strange at first. Then you notice a square hole is cut out inush carpet. Nice wallpaper. Nothing strange at first. Then you notice a square hole is cut out in the carpet. It's a little strange. You wonder why someone would cut a hole in the carpet. Then you look closer and you realize that the hole is about the size of a human body. The body that was found there was in such a state of decomposition that the emergency services had to cut a rectangular square in the carpet to carry it away. And you see, even the flies died. So you know that we are talking a long time here. There's something

so rational and undignified about this picture. As if everything that person was could be measured by a piece of missing carpet cut out with an exacto knife. Despite the grim stories that the pictures told, the show made a splash and all the media interviewed Tina. The national TV even tried to set up a debate about the issue between her and a representative from the city, who totally refused. They hated it. Everything could think of it. They asked him so many times, and they closed everything down. And he was furious.

I guess it's bad PR for the happiest nation on earth. I think it's very bad PR. But you know, I mean, Denmark is such a... I mean, you know how it is. On the surface, everything is happy-go-lucky, and under the surface there's so many strange things happening, you know.

There's something rotten in the state of Denmark. There's something rotten, I would say that. I go back to Denmark several times a year, to work on projects there, to see my friends and family. I'm always pretty busy, so I don't really notice these things. What I do see, though, is incredible wealth, incredible privilege, and a lot of xenophobia, racism, fear that someone will come and take our wealth from us. We're creeping into the corner, clutching our comfortable couches, passing laws that will keep foreigners away.

We would rather die of loneliness than make ourselves vulnerable by reaching out to others, by admitting that we don't have enough in ourselves. Looking at the empty rooms of Tina's photographs, I wonder who is really missing out. Now when I bicycle by these houses, I know next time you find a lonely person, it's up in that window there. I can simply see the way that people put old newspapers in front of the window, how the curtains are always drawn, how the windows are totally yellow of smoke, you know. And you just feel that something is going on in this apartment. And what I see, which is actually striking, is that more and more of these ads are popping up. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's

Theory of Everything. This episode is called When You're Lonely, Life is Very Long. This episode was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, and Pike Malinowski. It featured Tina Enghoff, Eric Kleinenberg, and Olivia Ling. Olivia is still working on her book about loneliness, but her book on alcoholism and writers just came out. It's called The Trip to Echo Spring,

and I think it's one of the best books of the year. You can find a link to it and a link to the books by our other guests at toe.prx.org. And if you visit the site, make sure to sign up for the mailing list. You'll get regular recommendations and information about upcoming shows.