It was the same vehicle whence, a year ago, I had alighted one summer evening on this very spot—how desolate, and hopeless, and objectless!

Yet a chance traveller might pass by; and I wish no eye to see me now: strangers would wonder what I am doing, lingering here at the sign-post, evidently objectless and lost.

She said of “Hyperion”: “It is desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the Author’s mind.”

Sonja’s is an objectless yearning, deeper than nostalgia.

In the early pages of her book, Witt writes of turning 30, and of conceiving of her singleness as an interim state; she describes a condition of objectless longing, a special form of loneliness that can only be generated by the technologies of connection.