How To Be Alone

‘Lean into loneliness like it is holding you’ – a poetic reflection on life in lockdown

The audiovisual poem How to Be Alone (2010) was a viral hit for the Canadian musician and poet Tanya Davis and the Canadian filmmaker Andrea Dorfman. Their sequel How to Be at Home updates the original for our age of COVID-19 lockdown, pairing Dorfman’s charming animations – a distinctive melding of stop-motion and illustration – with Davis’s lyrical musings on the isolation that she and much of the rest of the world has endured over the past eight months. The resulting short is an artful – and, depending on your current degree of solitude, perhaps cathartic – meditation on the many conflicting emotions inspired by being forced to spend time at home during a crisis.

Dive into a boundless cityscape with an immersive artwork inspired by the infinite (aeon.co)

 “The world breaks everyone and afterward

many are strong at the broken places.”

                                                                                   

~Ernest Hemingway

 “Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities. The stars are not so strange as the mind that studies then, analyzes their light, and measures their distance.”

-Harry Emerson Fosdick