Elenor Rigbi skuplja pirinač u crkvi gde se održalo venčanje
Živi u snovima
Čeka kraj prozora, noseći lice koje čuva u tegli pored vrata
Koga li čeka?
Otac Mekenzi piše reči za bogosluženje koje niko neće čuti
Elenor Rigbi je umrla u crkvi i sahranjena je zajedno sa svojim imenom
Niko nije došao…
Eleanor Rigby, a song about lonely people, was first sung by the Beatles with a string octet - without the guitars and drums of Ringo Starr - six decades ago, in 1966. It is still relevant in our fast and nervous Internet age of networked loners in which another epidemic is raging, the epidemic of loneliness, especially.
Svi ti usamljeni ljudi
Odakle li dolaze?
Svi ti usamljeni ljudi
Gde li pripadaju?
Colin Campbell, professor of sociology at the University of York, in the book The continuation of the story of Eleanor Rigby (The Continuing Story of Eleanor Rigby), writes that in the entire oeuvre of the Beatles there is no other verse that resembles the song about Eleanor Rigby. Because even though the poem consists of only 106 words, it has become a symbol or an embodiment of loneliness.
There was some dispute over who wrote most of that song, John Lennon or Paul McCartney. In all likelihood, it was Paul McCartney, who explained in an article for "Rolling Stone" in November 2020 that it is a song about old women he met as a child, he no longer knows how - he would simply meet them and buy them things, sit and talk with them, and they would tell incredible stories from the wartime that survived, and he, born in the war, liked those stories.
The mythology of that song also includes the fact that in the 1980s, in the cemetery of the parish church of St. Peter in Woolton, a neighborhood in Liverpool, a landmark for Beatles fans became a tombstone on which the name of Eleanor Rigby (1895–1939), the beloved wife of Thomas Woods, who died at the age of 44, was engraved.
McCartney had often walked through that churchyard as a boy, but he had no recollection of ever seeing the monument to Eleanor Rigby. He attributed the coincidence to his subconscious.
photo: wikipedia... FROM THE SONG BY THE BEATLES: J. Lennon, J. Harrison, R. Starr, and P. McCartney
In the first sketches, the heroine of that song was called Miss Daisy Hawkins. The name Eleanor was chosen after Eleanor Bronn who played alongside The Beatles in the film Help 1965. And as a bright 10x15 inch brass plaque today shows, the surname Rigby is borrowed from the name of the Rigby & Evens Ltd wine shop at 22 King Street, Bristol, which Paul McCartney passed in January 1966 to see his girlfriend Jane Usher, the actress and TV journalist, who fell in love with him at 35 Old Vic Theater in the same street in January 1966 In 1963, she was sent to interview him.
However, Paul McCartney added a different contribution to that mythology when in 1990 he donated a document dated 1911, signed by sixteen-year-old Eleanor Rigby, a cleaner at Liverpool City Hospital. When the document was auctioned for £115.000 in November 2008, McCartney said: "If someone wants to spend money to buy a document that proves a fictional character exists, that's fine with me."
It is not the most important thing for fans whether Eleanor Rigby from the song is named after a liquor store or a hospital cleaner. Just as, in a kind of pilgrimage, fans visit the graves of Elvis Presley in Graceland, James Dean and Rudolph Valentino and, without making a firm distinction between real and fictional characters, leave messages under the terrace of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, so they visit the tombstone of a person who is "not the one", a place that is like a secular shrine of popular culture in Liverpool. And the wine merchants are obviously hoping that they will stop by their shop as well. It doesn't matter which version is correct, they are all "correct enough" for the myth whose life these rituals prolong. And the myth of Eleanor Rigby from the poem became an archetype of loneliness.
GENERATION SPOKESPERSONS ON LONELINESS
When Douglas Copland, author Generation X, heard the song for the first time Eleanor Rigby, the story confused him, he desperately tried to find out what happened to her and wrote a novel of the same name, which explores the phenomenon of loneliness.
In his book Rebellion in style in 1970, Liverpool musician and critic George Malley admired the imaginative truth of Eleanor Rigby by comparing her to James Joyce's descriptions in Dubliners.
Poet and critic Antonia Susan Byatt, speaking on BBC Radio 3 in 1993, observed in that poem the minimalist perfection of Samuel Beckett's stories, which conveyed a level of despair unacceptable to the sensibilities of the English middle class.
Since 1966, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists and demographers have begun to study the lyrics of that song and to observe the Beatles as the spokesmen of their generation. Which they probably were.
In the winter of 1961, future Beatles manager Brian Epstein attended a performance at the claustrophobic Cavern jazz club on Matthew Street, Liverpool. He then saw a young audience and a young band, from the same community, reacting in a unique way. Their performances in "Caverna" were, albeit on a small scale, classic counterculture of the modern era. Music, fashion, ideas, language, local spirit and attitude were just some of the characteristics that confronted this specific group of young people at the early concerts who narrowly missed the consequences of national conscription. A natural kinship between the performer and the audience that will soon be exported to the world is shown.
The narrative of the Beatles is simple and universally understandable - friendship and love, writes Mike Parker in the thesis "Cultural Icons", created as part of his doctoral research at the University of Central Lancashire. He says that three icons marked that era: Che Guevara - Rebel, Marilyn Monroe - Sex and The Beatles - Love.
Eleanor Rigby as a song of social empathy, it was unique in the Beatles' repertoire because, as Parker observes, it was also iconic All you need is Love., introduced the universal themes of loneliness and human pathos into popular culture with its sublime narrative.
In some ways, Eleanor Rigby resembles the American-English poet Hugh Auden's Miss Gee, who lived in a small living room at number 83 – one of the Victorian brick terraced houses built in a neighborhood called Clevedon Terrace to accommodate the rapidly growing population of the Industrial Revolution – and knitted for the bazaar of nearby St Aloysius Church.
Mis Gi je pogledala u svetlost zvezda
I rekla: “Da li je ikoga briga
Što živim na Klivdon terasi
Sa sto funti godišnje?”
…Žene bez dece to shvate.
A muškarci kada se penzionišu;
da mora postojati neki izlaz
za njihovu osujećenu kreativnu vatru.
Mark Kurlansky, an American journalist and publicist (a peer of that generation, born in 1948), writes that the songs of the Beatles were examined like the songs of Alfred Tennyson (1850–1892), who became a lord thanks to his songs. He says that for some, 1968 was the year of sex, drugs and rock and roll, but that it was also the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; anti-war movements and the Tet Offensive; Black power; generation gap; avant-garde theater; the rise of the women's movement; spontaneous uprisings that broke out all over the world at the same time. The cultural and political history of that pivotal year, when television's influence on global events first became apparent, spanning the diverse fields of youth and music, politics and war, economics and media, shows how twelve volatile months transformed us and brought us to where we are today, writes Parker.
THE LONELINESS EPIDEMIC AND PUBLIC HEALTH
About six decades after the creation of that song, assistant professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology, Egyptology and Anthropology at the American University in Cairo Nadine AM Abdallah writes in the British Journal of Psychiatry in April 2025 that due to the timelessness and popularity of the Beatles, it is relevant to interpret Eleanor Rigby because Eleanor's age draws attention to the urgent need to address the problems of loneliness and social isolation in the elderly, which are strongly associated with depression, suicidality and increased cognitive decline and dementia.
In the spring of 2023, Vivek Halegere Marty (1977), an American physician and former vice admiral in the United States Public Health Corps and surgeon general under President Barack Obama, for the first time, as an official spokesperson authorized to provide Americans with the best available scientific information about health, used a word previously reserved for infectious diseases: epidemic. Not covid, but loneliness.
In an official warning letter, he described loneliness as a subjective but deeply harmful condition that increases the risk of depression, anxiety, violence, trauma, crime, dementia, cardiovascular disease and premature death, suicide, political apathy and even political polarization.
HOMELESS AND LONELINESS
"Marty writes with compassion, but his argument that it all boils down to loneliness is hard to swallow, not least because much of what he has to say about loneliness was said about homelessness in the 1980s, when homeless was a modern term – somehow easier to pronounce than poverty – but it didn't help. Since then, the number of homeless people in America has increased.
Maybe people who experience loneliness and people who experience homelessness need homes with other people who love and need them - and to know that they are needed in societies that care for them.
It is not a political agenda. It is an indictment of modern life", concluded Jill Lepore, a regular author of the "New Yorker" and professor at Harvard, on March 30, 2020, in an article entitled "The History of Loneliness".
And the World Health Organization (WHO) describes loneliness as a critical public health issue in modern society associated with approximately 871.000 premature deaths annually. Every sixth person worldwide is affected.
According to a 2021 study by the Spanish Foundation for Cooperation and Social Inclusion ONCE entitled "The cost of unwanted loneliness in Spain" (El coste de la soledad no desesada en España), the direct costs of loneliness are more than $16 billion each year – public health costs from doctor visits and drug use $6,93 billion, annual costs associated with lost productivity (reduced work hours) rose to about $9,08 billion…
Somehow they calculated that loneliness in 2021 led to a reduction in quality of life equal to 1,04 million years of good health. In the United States, according to a report by the Center for Brain Health, absenteeism alone costs $460 million a year.
photo: andrija vukelic / tanjugLONELINESS: Increasing and more frequent
YOUR LONELINESS - OUR BUSINESS
As governments seek answers to the loneliness epidemic, the market has already been activated. And the ways in which companies capitalize on this demand can seem a bit dystopian, writes Dr. Matt Johnson on the Psychology Today platform, pointing to the growth of the "loneliness economy" (The Loneliness Economy). It is about a multitude of platforms that provide different services fueled by loneliness, without it being prostitution or business escort.
For example, an application RentAFriend as the name implies, it helps you "match with friends", but it is not "Tinder for friendships" (a popular platform for finding friends), it is a transactional service. You pay a person $40 an hour to serve as your temporary friend. They will have dinner with you, have a drink after work or – for an additional fee – attend a concert with you. It operates in dozens of countries worldwide and offers over 620.000 platonic friends for rent online.
Club against loneliness Ground floor at four locations in California offers the so-called co-working, the name is reminiscent of former cooperatives, shared flexible and fully equipped workspaces with high-speed Internet that allow freelancers and others to work in a collaborative environment without long-term leases.
Under the title "Your loneliness is our business", "Pais" on June 22, 2025 described in detail how, globally, a new economy of loneliness is rapidly taking shape.
The list of anti-loneliness remedies includes: pets (both real and virtual), social robots for seniors, intergenerational mentoring programs, senior housing (apartments that promote an active lifestyle), shared housing, social spaces and opportunities for group travel and other experiences, AI-generated friendship bots, dating apps, buddies for rent, courses, medications (anxiolytics, antidepressants, etc.), digital mental health clinics…
A report by consulting firm Grand View Research estimates that the global pet care market will exceed $427 billion in 2032, up from $259,37 billion in 2024.
And the AI virtual companion market will reach $140,754 billion by 2030; dating platform market $17,28 billion; the mental health app market is expected to triple, reaching $20,92 billion in 2033.
YOU CURE LONELINESS, THAT'S THE PROBLEM
"The New Yorker" under the title "Artificial intelligence will solve the problem of loneliness, it's a problem" writes on July 14, 2025 that five years ago the idea that a machine could be anyone's confidante would have sounded strange, like a science fiction premise. In recent studies, people were asked to rate whether they were interacting with a human or a chatbot. These experiments usually reveal a bias: if people know they're talking to a chatbot, they'll rate the interaction lower. But in blind comparisons, AI often has the upper hand. In one study, researchers took nearly two hundred exchanges from Reddit's r/AskDocs, where verified doctors and ChatGPT answered the same queries. Healthcare workers who did not know who they were communicating with rated ChatGPT's answers better, which they rated as "empathetic" or "very empathetic" ten times more often than doctors' answers.
Not everyone is impressed, though. Molly Crockett, a scientist who studies cognitive and psychological phenomena, wrote in the Guardian that these man-machine "calculations" are "rigged against us humans" - they ask people to act like bots, performing non-emotional, transactional tasks. No one, she points out, when faced with a terrifying diagnosis, actually longs for the advice of a chatbot, but wants "systemic care that really nourishes us".
Some people say that the success of social media was a product of the loneliness epidemic; some, again, think it contributed to loneliness; others believe that social media is the only cure for loneliness. "The Economist" declared loneliness "the leprosy of the 21st century". The epidemic only grew, states Jill Lepore in "The New Yorker".
YOUNG, NETWORKED AND ALONE
When asked what are the leading causes of loneliness in America, 73 percent of respondents in a Pew Research Center survey (Pew Research Center) chose technology.
Sociologists Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashear showed the rise of the Internet and mobile phones as one of the main trends that pull people away from traditional social life in their places, associations... It turns out that technology does not destroy but often replaces already weakened social relations.
Social networks can heighten the sense of exclusion for those who are already marginalized, but they can also make it easier for those who already have connections to maintain.
While only 45 percent of Americans discuss important matters with someone who is not a family member, 55 percent of Internet users have such conversation partners among people they are not related to, according to a 2009 Pew Center survey.
To understand the current crisis in the first months of 2020, during the covid 19 pandemic, Harvard psychologist Richard Weisburd and Milena Batanova created a survey of 66 questions, including the question: "Has someone taken more than just a few minutes to ask you how you are doing in a way that made you feel that they genuinely care?"
When the raw results of that survey, conducted among 950 households, were sent back a few weeks later, Weisburd told a New York Times reporter that he was genuinely shocked: "People obviously suffered very, very much."
The report of that Harvard study has a strong title that speaks to the complexity of the phenomenon: "Loneliness in America: Only the Tip of the Iceberg" (Making Caring Common. Loneliness in America: Just the Tip of the Iceberg). Among respondents who consider themselves lonely, there were more than in previous surveys (65 percent) who said that they felt "essentially separated from others or from the world".
To be continued in the next issue.
Un-American Solitude and The Lonely Crowd; forty percent of single-member households in Russia, Robinson Crusoe and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; solitude or loneliness - the real name of everyday lamentation.
