The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

IMAGINE STANDING BY A WINDOW at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.

Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired.

Statements like this have a more than casual link with the belief that our whole purpose is as coupled creatures, or that happiness can or should be a permanent possession.

the idea that loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.

Warhol’s art patrols the space between people, conducting a grand philosophical investigation into closeness and distance, intimacy and estrangement.

Loneliness, I began to realise, was a populated place: a city in itself.

used to imagine that place as a city, perhaps at dusk, when everyone turns homeward and the neon flickers into life.

was in the city because I’d fallen in love, headlong and too precipitously, and had tumbled and found myself unexpectedly unhinged.

I went back to my room, sat on the couch and watched the world outside me going on through glass, a light bulb at a time.

the omnipresent, unanswerable feeling that I was in a state of lack, that I didn’t have what people were supposed to, and that this was down to some grave and no doubt externally unmistakable failing in my person: all

Almost as soon as I arrived, I was aware of a gathering anxiety around the question of visibility. I wanted to be seen, taken in and accepted, the way one is by a lover’s approving gaze. At the same time I felt dangerously exposed, wary of judgement, particularly in situations where being alone felt awkward or wrong, where I was surrounded by couples or groups.

One of the vertices is cut off by the edge of the canvas, but surely it’s narrowing too sharply, leaving no room for the expected hatch or gangway. This is the kind of subtle geometric disturbance that Hopper was so skilled at, and which he used to kindle emotion in the viewer, to produce feelings of entrapment and wariness, of profound unease.

1953, the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan came up with what still stands as a working definition: ‘the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy’.

Never Promised You a Rose Garden.

‘On Loneliness’.

Loneliness feels like such a shameful experience, so counter to the lives we are supposed to lead, that it becomes increasingly inadmissible, a taboo state whose confession seems destined to cause others to turn and flee.

Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation.

According to work being carried out over the past decade by John Cacioppo and his team at the University of Chicago, loneliness profoundly affects an individual’s ability to understand and interpret social interactions, initiating a devastating chain-reaction, the consequence of which is to further estrange them from their fellows.

This creates, of course, a vicious circle, in which the lonely person grows increasingly more isolated, suspicious and withdrawn. And because the hypervigilance hasn’t been consciously perceived, it’s by no means easy to recognise, let alone correct, the bias.

What this means is that the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents.

Rear Window,

viewed. In Rear Window voyeurism is explicitly presented as an escape from intimacy, a way of side-stepping real emotional demands.

you are not being touched at all, then speech is the closest contact it is possible to have with another human being.

The irony is that when you are engaged in larger and more satisfactory intimacies, these quotidian exchanges go off smoothly, almost unnoticed, unperceived. It is only when there is a paucity of deeper and more personal connection that they develop a disproportionate importance, and with it a disproportionate risk.

was as if, having been so cataclysmically dismissed, my ears had become attuned to the note of rejection, and when it came, as it inevitably does, in small doses throughout the day, some vital part of me clamped and closed, poised to flee not so much physically as deeper into the interior of the self.

‘To me,’ he said, ‘good talkers are beautiful because good talk is what I love.’

Though I made myself venture out each day for a walk by the river, I was spending increasing hours sprawled on the orange couch in my apartment, my laptop propped against my legs, sometimes writing emails or talking on Skype, but more often just prowling the endless chambers of the internet, watching music videos from my teenaged years or spending eye-damaging hours scrolling through racks of clothes on the websites of labels I couldn’t afford. I would have been lost without my MacBook, which promised to bring connection and in the meantime filled and filled the vacuum left by love.

Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations,

just as in a conversation one doesn’t stop to itemise the elements of the room in which it’s taking place.

Intimacy can’t exist if the participants aren’t willing to make themselves known, to be revealed.

loneliness proceeds does not happen in isolation, but rather as an interplay between the individual and the society in which they are embedded,

focusing in particular on how an individual can survive within an antagonistic society, a society that might plausibly want them dead rather than tolerate their existence. It’s passionately in favour of diversity; acutely aware of how isolating a homogeneous world can be.

my home,’ he wrote in his memoir, Close to the Knives, ‘one could not laugh, one could not express boredom, one could not cry, one could not play, one could not explore, one could not engage in any activity that showed development or growth that was independent.’

Stonewall riots

In Fire in the Belly,

Tom Rauffenbart

wrote in a biographical summary titled ‘Dateline’,

Was it a figure he could enter (as later, in his diary: ‘I want to create a myth that I can one day become’),

Gordon Matta-Clark,

As for the cruising years, they were also documented by dozens of photographers, some amateur and some professional, among them Alvin Baltrop, Frank Hanlon, Leonard Fink, Allen Tannenbaum, Stanley Stellar and Arthur Tress, as well as Peter Hujar, the man who would become the most stabilising and important figure in David’s

The Motion of Light in Water,

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue,

God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body, or rather everything that attaches to it.

Often she went all the way to Washington Square and back, a loop of six miles, stopping to gaze in the windows of bookstores and delis, walking aimlessly, walking not as a means but as an end, an ideal occupation in and of itself.

The Ballad of Sexual Dependency,

Here too I must say something about time. As with David Wojnarowicz’s account of his childhood, the sense of time in Darger’s record is often blurry or uncertain. There are many sentences along the lines of ‘I do not remember the number of years I lived with my father’ or ‘I believe I was at the asylum 7 years’. This temporal unsteadiness is a consequence of too many moves and too little explanation about them, relating too to the absence of a devoted parent, who helps to organise a child’s memories by telling their story back to them and keeping them appraised of their chronology, their place. For Henry, there was no one to keep track; no agency and no control.

Many of his findings tally with current research on loneliness, particularly the notion that isolation leads to a decline in social sophistication, which in itself elicits further episodes of rejection.

The bleak truth Harlow’s experiment reveals is that a child’s need for attachment far outweighs its capacity for self-protection:

they froze into fixed positions or repeated strange gestures of the hand and arm.

For me, this was the most disturbing aspect of Harlow’s work: the revelation that after an experience of loneliness both the damaged individual and the healthy society work in concert to maintain separation.