From the poet William Wordsworth, who wandered as lonely as a cloud, to thousands of pop songs about lost love, culture is full of references to loneliness.
Some authors wrote odes to her, like Virginia Woolf who said that loneliness allowed her to feel "the song of the real world".
Roman Emili Bronte, Hurricane Heights, pulsates with an agonizing loneliness, from its setting in the windswept Yorkshire moors to the lonely anti-hero Heathcliff.
It is said that the writer avoided socializing with people and rarely left Haworth.
And comedian Lili Tomlin once joked: "Just don't forget." We're all in this alone."
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Artists traditionally spend time away from others, in order to better connect with their own muse.
Shakespeare wrote one of his famous masterpieces King Lear in quarantine at the beginning of the 17th century, while the Black Death was ravaging London.
Frida Kahlo said that she painted self-portraits, for which she is best known, because "she was often alone".
Van Gogh left Paris in the hope that the calmer environment of Arles in the south of France would give him a clear mind.
The archetype of the lonely, tortured artist can be found in the case of the Renaissance architect and painter Đorđe Vasari.
His influential book from 1550, Lives of artists, describes artists as people who live on the periphery of society, literally and metaphorically.
Of course, not everyone wants to be isolated, and the recent quarantine during the corona virus pandemic and social distancing have inevitably led to a stronger feeling of loneliness, especially among young people.
But if loneliness is distressing, then solitude is a somewhat more acceptable beast, and individuals have chosen to remain alone since ancient times.
The first known Christian ascetic was Paul of Tyves, who is believed to have lived alone in the Egyptian desert for decades.
Anthony Storr, in the book Solitude: Returning to yourself, made the claim that spending pleasant time in solitude is essential for mental health and creativity, and that the deepest human experiences have very little to do with our relationship to others.
No less than Picasso is also often quoted on this issue: "No great work can be created without great solitude."
Loneliness of the soul
Loneliness and grief formed a deep, dark thread running through British artist Tracey Emin's 2021 exhibition.
Her exhibition at the London Royal Academy, where the works of Edvard Munch were also shown, was called Loneliness of the soul.
It reflected the qualities she identified with in the works of the Norwegian expressionist since she "fell in love with him" at the age of 18, she told BBC Culture.
Emin is perhaps still best known for her "confessional" and controversial art installations from the 1990s, which include My bed, with cigarette butts, vodka bottles and a stained mattress, as well as Everyone I slept with 1963-1995, decorated with 102 names.
Not to mention a reputation for hedonism and shocking emotional openness about her public and private life.
As she herself says: "I always say everything as it is."
But her art and life have changed in the meantime.
She has to deal with an extraordinary talent for painting while recovering from a serious illness.
In July 2020, Emin was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma of the bladder, the same disease from which her mother Pam died in 2016.
Emin underwent a radical procedure to remove the bladder, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, lymph nodes, urethra and part of the colon and vagina.
In April 2021, during a guest appearance on the BBC, she announced that her cancer was "gone".
She also described coming to terms with the fact that she would spend the rest of her life with a "severe disability" (a urostomy bag replaced her bladder).
"I didn't realize how much I wanted to live until I was convinced I was going to die," she said.
In May 2021, her "cancer self-portraits" were published in to the Guardian, bold selfies taken while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery.
Before her cancer diagnosis, Emin worked hard on an exhibition for the Royal Academy.
Out of thousands of works from Munch's archive in Oslo, Norway, she chose the painter's 18 oil paintings and watercolors.
They were paired with more than 25 of her works, including paintings, sculptures and neons - many created in the same period, only 100 years later.
It was a revolutionary exhibition, the first time that these two artists were exhibited together.
The themes of grief and loneliness are palpable, the works are full of drama and quite heartbreaking, especially in the context of her illness.
In works I am the last of my line (2019) and You came (2018) vulnerability and anguish are evident in the solitary nude figures, and trauma is deeply etched in the powerful This is life without you - I feel this way because of you (2018), while earlier neon rad More solitude (2014) indicates the necessity of alienation from others.
Her forty-year-old fascination with Munch points to parallels in their lives and mindsets.
He painted his own emotional states with painful rawness, a shocking new technique that gave birth to expressionism.
His "pictures of souls" - tormented souls and ghostly lovers - reflected his fascination with spiritualism and the supernatural, popular at the time.
That interest is another thing they have in common because Emin had previously talked about how her relatives used to hold séances at home in Margate.
Munk had a drinking problem and was forced to give up alcohol to preserve his sanity, and Emin also stopped drinking to preserve her health.
She sees him as a kindred spirit, telling me over the phone from her apartment in London: "I identified with how he viewed the world so alone."
"He was very emotional, but also very existential, always in a position to look from the outside in."
Munk was not particularly happy, as one might assume based on his works: "He had a lot of relationships, but not a lot of sex," she says.
Emin has always been open about her love life.
She told me that she had not been in a relationship for 11 years and that she had lived alone for 20 years, and then corrected herself: "I lived with a cat, Doket, but he died last year."
Doket was her "little soul mate".
But now that he is gone, she feels that she has more space, more opportunities to let love into her life.
Emin interpreted Munch's portraits of death (he lost his mother when he was five, his sister when he was 14) in the context of the recent pandemic.
"He grew up with a lot of death around him. Just think, before this pandemic, some people did not have the experience of death unless it was their parents, for example.
"Now very few people can say that after those years. People have also become much more aware of the finitude and fragility of life."
She herself could belong to that group, and that helped shape her experience of loneliness during the previous years.
When she was diagnosed with cancer, she deliberately distanced herself from friends to conserve energy to get through the surgery and recover, she says.
During her recovery, she worked less and allowed her friends to come back into her life, and she is also glad for their support.
"I'm happier now than I've ever been," she says.
Facing death "made other problems pale in comparison."
"If something made me unhappy before, it would overwhelm me.
"Now I just deal with it and move on, cancer really helped me with that."
The artist found a new zest for life.
It is planned that her bronze sculpture nine meters high named Majka, will be placed in front of the Munk Museum in Oslo.
"I'm giving Munk the mother he never had," says Emin.
Her studio complex in Margate should be completed soon, and a major exhibition in Venice, postponed due to illness, has been postponed to 2024.
"I am open to love, which is very different from how I felt before, I also feel that I deserve it, and maybe I didn't before," she stated.
Her psyche has changed, she believes that her ordeal has erased the trauma.
"She's gone," she says.
Emin appreciates her "fantastic life" and says that she "accepts all odds".
"I know being close to death has a lot to do with it."
She now tries to lead a "quieter, calmer life" and plans to fill her days with "painting to the song of the birds."
She is sure of one thing, and that is that she no longer feels alone.
"I think the chance of me dying without someone holding my hand is practically non-existent."
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Wilderness tonic
According to many artists and writers, there is a "cure" for loneliness.
Maya Angelou used to say that her medicine was music: "I can crawl into the space between the notes and curl up so that I turn my back on loneliness."
Others find it in nature, hiking, swimming in the wilderness, that is, the "wilderness tonic", as Henry David Thoreau defined it.
Author Martin Šo knows all about the positive aspects of outdoor insulation.
As a "guide for ritual wilderness tours," he takes groups into the deepest Dartmoor, England's highlands, and other remote places, where they stand apart and learn to "reconnect with nature and their own character."
Nature retreats like this date back to ancient Celtic times, says Shaw, the book's author Smoke hole: Gazing into the wilderness in the age of binoculars, which reshapes myths for our times.
He also collaborated with actor Mark Rylance and artist Aj Vejvej.
Shaw tells BBC Culture that people on his tours, from troubled teenagers to traumatized war veterans, may complain that they are bored or homesick.
"But I've never had anyone come back and say they were lonely.
"There is so much stimulation in the wilderness that there may be no room for loneliness," said Šo.
Shaw feels at home outdoors.
He had lived in a tent for four years, but despite his deep inner resources, the confinement he felt in his Dartmoor home during his third quarantine was a bit too much.
"I felt really lonely and missed conversations and the simplest interactions."
The key is to create deep connections, according to Dr Andrea Wigfield of the Center for Loneliness Studies at the University of Sheffield.
The center's research has shown that when people can't be together, arts-based activities, such as grandchildren and grandparents working together on online art projects, can help them reconnect.
However, they are not enough to fight loneliness if there are no deep connections.
In the UK, Loneliness Awareness Week is held in June.
The Marmalade organization is behind it, and the theme for 2021 was acceptance.
Through their campaign We all get lonely sometimes they wanted loneliness to be accepted and experienced as a natural part of human being.
Writer Olivia Leng knows very well what it looks like to find positivity in negativity.
Having moved to New York in the thirties after a breakup, she felt terrible loneliness every day.
A book developed from this, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Solitude, which was a hit.
New York Times said that it is "a bold book about the universal struggle to be recognized".
In it, Leng explores loneliness through art, with essays about Time capsules Andy Warhol i Nighthawks Edvard Hopper, among others.
Lang tells me that focusing on Hopper's paintings, with its "sense of detachment, of confinement between walls or in a cage, combined with an almost unbearable exposure" helped her and "reduced the burden of her own feelings."
"Someone else has dealt with loneliness and found beauty and even value in it."
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