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.

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

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

Was the diner a refuge for the isolated, a place of succour, or did it serve to illustrate the disconnection that proliferates in cities? The painting’s brilliance derived from its instability, its refusal to commit.

the lonelier a person gets, the less adept they become at navigating social currents.

The silence of Hopper’s paintings becomes more toxic after the revelation of how violently he worked to suppress and check his wife.

what is being declared is barriers and boundaries, wanted things at a distance and unwanted things too close: an erotics of insufficient intimacy, which is of course a synonym for loneliness itself.

As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’s strange, estranging spell.

Andy had trouble making himself understood right through his teens and into adulthood: saying ‘“ats” for “that is”, “jeetjet” for “did you eat yet?” and “yunz” for “all of you”’;

Andy Warhol was a yinzer!

Sameness, especially for the immigrant, the shy boy agonisingly aware of his failures to fit in, is a profoundly desirable state; an antidote against the pain of being singular, alone,

‘He made a virtue of his vulnerability, and forestalled or neutralized any possible taunts.

Nobody could ever “send him up”. He had already done so himself.’

This is the push and pull of intimacy, a process Warhol found much more manageable once he realised the mediating capacities of machines, their ability to fill up empty emotional space.

Many people live constricted lives, but what is astonishing about Darger is the compensatory scale as well as richness of his internal sphere.

But humans are social creatures too, and also tend to cast out individuals who do not fit easily into the group.

Extraordinary, in this light, that Darger managed to create so much, to leave such luminous traces in his wake.

In short, being stigmatised is not just lonely, or humiliating, or shameful; it also kills.

At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy, for which I was surrendering all the pieces of my identity, every element except the physical carcass in which I was supposedly contained. And it only took a few missed connections or lack of likes for the loneliness to resurface, to be flooded with the bleak sense of having failed to make contact.

There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.

loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.

I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted. Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city.