The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

by Olivia Laing

You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people.

And again, in the documentary Hopper’s Silence, when O’Doherty asks: ‘Are your paintings reflective of the isolation of modern life?’ A pause, then Hopper says tersely: ‘It may be true. It may not be true.’ Later, asked what draws him to the dark scenes he favours, he replies opaquely: ‘I suppose it’s just me.’

to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as ‘our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness’.

According to a 2010 study, loneliness predicts increased morbidity and mortality, which is an elegant way of saying that loneliness can prove fatal.

In fact, it seems almost certain now that it is the subjective experience of loneliness that produces the physical consequences, not the simple fact of being alone. It is the feeling itself that is stressful; the feeling that sets the whole grim cascade into motion.

At eighteen, he went to art school in New York, where he was taught by Robert Henri, one of the foremost proponents of the gritty urban realism known as the Ashcan School.

‘Whenever one reads about your work, it is always said that loneliness and nostalgia are your themes.’ ‘If they are,’ Hopper replies cautiously, ‘it isn’t at all conscious.’ And then, reversing again: ‘I probably am a lonely one.’

‘The silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated.’ I was failing to make those complicated adjustments, those enormous silent shifts, and as such I was exposing myself as a non-native, an outsider, someone who doesn’t know the code word is regular or drip.

I come from nowhere, Warhol once famously said, referring to poverty or Europe or the myth of self-creation, though perhaps also attesting to the linguistic rent from out of which he had emerged.

the notoriously filthy and brutal Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane (where Edie Sedgwick was also a patient at the time),

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.