Laura Marris

In Greek, the word eremos can be applied to a lonely person, but it also means a desolated place. There’s a doubleness to this lens, a reciprocity: when people monopolize a place, we often deprive
ourselves of sharing it with the abundance of other living beings. “I have frequent conversations with students who have almost normalized this prospect,” writes the author Robert Macfarlane; “they feel themselves involuntarily to be entering … ‘The Age of Loneliness,’ in which our depletion of more-than-human communities results in an emptied, echoing earth.”

What I realized in the airport was that when I spent time in a lonely landscape, I instinctively felt it, and I just as instinctively pushed that feeling away. It alarmed me that I, too, had almost normalized the emptiness, for reasons that tangled with the personal, even as they went beyond it.