The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind.

‘My queerness,’ he wrote in a biographical summary titled ‘Dateline’, ‘was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society.’

outside the gleaming factory of monogamy, the pressure to cuddle up, to couple off, to go like Noah’s animals two by two into a permanent container, sealed from the world. As Solanas bitterly remarked: ‘Our society is not a community but merely a collection of isolated family units.’

He possessed an openness that was in itself beautiful, though he sometimes wondered if he was only capable of reproducing the ugliness he’d seen.

‘To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions on the pre-invented world.’

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings – depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage – are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.