We are social creatures. My wife provided home made scones to a few people in our church who had been gardening there and was urged to repeat it next week and slowly the number of those coming each week grew. One of the ladies who came and brought a friend revealed that it was the only time she spoke to anyone if her daughter did not visit during the whole week apart from speaking to the check out girl in the supermarket.
This sort of social gathering was delivered a fearful blow as a result of lockdown. Many social organisations are folding because the elderly have been terrified of meeting others and catching covid and many of those younger have got out of the habit of supporting such social gatherings. The previous habit have been diverted. However, like my wife’s gatherings I believe the urge to fight back at this isolation still remains if it is not strangled by official saftyism.

I’m not sure that A Christmas Carol is primarily about loneliness or alienation due to social, economic and political conditions (although, as Dickens clearly intended, it’s surely about those things as well). For me, at any rate, it’s primarily about despair due to personal failure and the need for personal renewal or rejuvenation. It’s about the possibility of spiritual regeneration and therefore of hope.
When I watch–and I watch it at least once a year in one version or another–the most disturbing scene comes near the beginning. Scrooge meets the ghost of Jacob Marley, who moans while dragging around the heavy chains that he had forged in life, one sinful link after another. I do the same thing, dragging around the ugly memories of my own mistakes. Lest I sound too melodramatic, I generally think of these in terms of stupidity or inadequacy in relationships, not of malicious intentions with evil consequences.) If only, I keep thinking, I could have a lobotomy to erase those tormenting memories or, better still, change my past. If only I could have been a better son or a better friend.
The most joyful scene, not surprisingly, comes near the end. Scrooge wakes up in bed and realizes ecstatically that he still has enough time to change and redeem himself, to escape from the torment of his own past through compassion and reconciliation. I experience this as a powerful antidote to the prevailing cynicism. Why go on living without being worthy of life, after all, and therefore without hope?
A Christmas Carol is not a sociological or psychological treatise in narrative form. Nor is it merely a story, let alone a ghost story. It is a myth that reveals a profound and universal truth about the human condition.

I am a 61 year old man. I have been single for over 20 years and I’ve lived alone for 10 years. My life is not lonely, it is solitary. I prefer it this way. Sartre said “hell is other people” and I couldn’t agree more. I abhor crowds and parties. I’ve got the life I’ve always wanted. My own house, part-time job, and no-one to bother me. On Christmas day I will walk miles to the park and back, watch The Big Lebowski, and cook myself a vegetarian meal. I expect to be in bed by about 11pm as per normal. It’s no big deal.

I write to Unherd

I wish to tell the editor, and the writer, this is the best bit of writing to appear in this magazing in a good wile. You need to commission him more.

What’s wrong with enjoying loneliness? Hell is indeed other people, and the joy of the internet and social media is that one can interact with other humans to a level that you define entirely to suit yourself. That’s never been possible before.

Brilliantly done, especially poetically. The notion of thin — threadbare, hungry, but also permeable, rendable . . . contrast “thick” relations and descriptions, tapestry . . . this is a masterful little essay. Kudos. Enjoy the season!

It is a commonplace that our modern rationalist, individualist, citified world is more alone and solitary and anti-social than the good old days.
But I wonder.

A good piece. He’s right about the thin places. Might seem like garbage in the secular 21st century, but the idea that there are places that lie closer to an alternate reality isn’t that far fetched. Think about a shadow or a reflection, that’s as close as we can get to second dimensional reality. Now think about the third dimension, which we inhabit, and how it might appear to the posited inhabitants of a fourth dimension. Is it possible that there are instances where the third and fourth intersect, just as the second and third sometimes intersect? I wouldn’t rule it out.

I am trying not to be dismissive or too hard hearted here – it is Christmas after all! But this article does seem to tread well worn territory. Of course there are lots of people, but I’d say a small minority, who are isolated, lonely and quite possibly depressed. But we live in a complicated world.

The trouble is, there is not a wand we can wave to overcome this, not least because some – many? – of these people actively ‘want’ to be on their own as I know from experience with friends, one of whom recently cut himself off for 4 years and has since tragically been found dead in his flat.

A big subject – though I am a gay man and have every reason to be thankful for social freedoms, I do wonder whether a society based largely on individual rights and not social obligations and mutual support isn’t inevitably going to generate these problems. However, it is complicated, we can’t honestly (I don’t think) say that things are obviously better elsewhere or in the past. More collective societies can be utterly stifling and also breed resentments, albeit ones that are largely suppressed. (I recall reading about a small farm in India where the patriarch lived to a ripe old age and held back the independent lives of his children).

Many people like precisely these individual freedoms, they don’t want to be their parents’ carers for one example, and to make things more morally complex, nether do many modern western parents want their children to look after them in their old age. Meanwhile, living in a not desperately affluent part of Southeast London, I see most ordinary people living pretty happily and engaged with their families, warts and all.

” rebirth of hope in the depths of winter”
Is it possible, then, to celebrate Christmas in the southern hemisphere?

I think the paragraph about Jo Cox should read: ‘Before she was said to have been murdered by , etc.’. This is an extraordinarily mysterious murder story with dozens of still unanswered questions. Yet it is rarely or never revisited. I wonder why not.