Laura Marris
The Age of Loneliness: An Atlas of Extremes
“If we choose the path of destruction,” E. O. Wilson writes in Half-Earth, “the planet will continue to descend irreversibly into the Anthropocene Epoch, the biologically final age in which the planet exists almost exclusively by, for, and of ourselves. I prefer to call this option by another name, the Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness.”
Though it is often associated with weakness or frailty, loneliness is actually one of the most persistent feelings, an emotion that has outlasted presence into absence. In a parallel way, our loneliness in the Eremocene is also a result of human ability to tolerate and survive in the increasingly extreme environments we have created. But as the sixth extinction unfolds, forcing other species into scarcity, it’s unclear how much ecological loneliness we will ultimately be able to tolerate. This collection of linked essays weaves the human loneliness of long-distance relationships with the contemporary landscapes of the Eremocene, exploring the spaces in which personal loneliness and ecological loneliness overlap and inform each other. Instead of natural disasters, I focus these essays on how we can recognize the quotidian strangeness of our increasingly lonely environment. By considering the resilience of tardigrades, commuting through extreme weather at the airport, or exploring a 32-acre meadow destroyed to make way for self-driving cars, I examine the kinds of loneliness that humans normalize in the Eremocene. In treating loneliness as a form of resilience, this project aims to show the costs of tolerance, and how we can sensitize ourselves to what is happening in our landscapes.
Laura Marris
Laura Marris is a writer and translator. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Yale Review,The Volta, The Point and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and a Daniel Varoujan Award. Recent translations include Albert Camus’s The Plague, Louis Guilloux’s Blood Dark, and Geraldine Schwarz’s Those Who Forget, which was shortlisted for the 2021 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She teaches creative writing at the University at Buffalo and is currently at work with Alice Kaplan on a book of essays called States of Plague: Reading Albert Camus in a Pandemic.